I have some orthorectified 1m NAIP aerial imagery that I want to use to add and correct some features, but I don’t know how to import the image into JOSM. Is this possible? It really should be, tracing stuff from an image is going to be much quicker than going out and walking/driving all these features.
…much quicker, but I don’t see road names on the aerial imagery, or many things. You should combine this feature with the data that can be gathered on the ground, or another source, if you want to produce a practical/useful map.
Very much tortoise and the hare really, except this time the hare gets tied to the start post on a 5 yard tether.
The WMSplugin may allow you to import your own images, but I’m not sure. More information on it can be found here. I’ve never had any good imagry where i’ve mapped so can’t really suggest better, but that’s my guess.
Well, this is in the US, so the TIGER data is already there with all the names. It needs some correction, but I know all the street names in the small area I am dealing with. My big problem is that the TIGER data misplaces some roads and leaves some out, and does not include a lot of other data that I want to include so that I can render a custom map, like land use, water bodies, and building outlines. If I was only adding data for OSM the Yahoo imagery would be sufficient, but for some of this I really want the vertical, orthorectified aerial imagery.
As for the WMS plugin, it can only import WMS tiles served over the net, Yahoo imagery, and a small set of maps from a particular website that does not seem to be functioning properly. It does not claim to be able to load actual files.
The best I could find was this blog about a WMS map rectifier that then serves you that image from a WMS server.
Hi. Just joining the project. My initial aim is to transfer my existing mountainbiking maps into a format I can use on a new Garmin GPS. Seems like I should make them generally available, and OSM seems like the right place.
Reason for posting here: The only missing link so far for me is how to display the maps I created previously, TIFF/Oziexplorer format, as the background on an OSM editor.
Seems to me like a fairly common thing one would want to do, use one’s own bitmap as a background. I’ll have a look at WMS map rectifier, as emj suggested, but if anyone else has any grand suggestions, please make them.
So I got some answers from the mailing list, this is the most verbose.:
How do we move forward on this? How do we find someone with the appropriate skills and time and desire to add this? I’m unfortunately not in a position at the moment where I would be able to do this myself - would need to be more familiar with the tools and learn some Java first… I would guess that this would be a feature useful to many people…?
You can use the map rectify service, have looked into that?
Just started a new job and looking for a place to live (in Muenchen Altstadt oder Glockenbach, 2 Zi ungefaehr 55qm 
so I’m sorry to say that I have not had time to do anything further on this yet… Unemployment was great whilst it lasted!
Hello, I have a similar problem. I have access to very high resolution (15 cm), orthorectified, georeferenced aerial photographs of the area I want to edit. I have the authorisation to use it to edit/add to the existing data from OSM. However, I cannot use Metacarta as it would mean giving this picture away, which I am not authorised to do.
I could easily do it in ArcGIS but then I could not contribute my edits to OSM, which would be a shame. The most sensible thing to do would be to be able to warp the aerial as a layer in JOSM, do the editing and then upload to OSM. I tried to use the PicLayer plugin but it does not provide a good way of warping the aerial and doing it manually is a real pain in the back and by no way of satisfactory accuracy.
I cannot spend too much time on this. I would be glad to contribute to OSM if there is an easy way of doing this. Otherwise, I’m afraid I shall have to renounce.
Is there any way of doing this I have missed in the forum and Wiki?
You can use ArcGIS rather well if you can tolerate some inconvenience with sending the edits back. Take OSM shapefiles from Cloudmade or Geofabrik as a reference layer and open them on top of your images in ArcGIS. It can project the layers to suit together on-the-fly. Then create a new layer for edits and digitise everything that needs to be corrected on that layer. Save the correction layer to shapefile, convert it to gpx format and open with JOSM. As a result you can see in JOSM where the roads should be. Inconvenience comes from that you need to do at least part of editing again with JOSM. Not a nice workflow but it is doable.