I am using Qgis to download buildings and data for an area that includes the city of Tampa. But only a portion of the buildings are downloaded. Also, in QGis, it looks like like many of the buildings aren’t selectable. Anyone else run into this situation?
I don’t have to use Qgis, so if there’s an easy alternative method to download data for a large area, that would be great. I don’t know python or other programming languages, so I really need a simple workflow.
Downloading data - OpenStreetMap Wiki - especially Planet.osm - OpenStreetMap Wiki
You can also ask whoever made this QGIS plugin (or ask QGIS authors if that is core functionality) why it is not working as expected.
You don’t say how you are downloading data into QGIS. Is this using the QuickOSM Plugin or something else? Which version of QGIS are you using? What are your expectations of OSM building coverage in the area?
FWIW I normally run queries in Overpass-turbo directly and save these as Geojson for loading into QGIS. If I am regularly querying the same dataset I will load that into PostGIS using osm2pgsql and query it with SQL.
I’m using the QuickOSM Plugin. I was successful in downloading the data into QGIS. But I couldn’t download the entire jurisdiction at one time. Had to break it into two smaller areas. I’m now having challenges exporting the layer. When I export it to a shape file, I’m losing the attribute data. So, I having to trouble shoot that. Ultimately, I want to import the building footprints and heights into ESRI CityEngine to create a 3D model of the city. I can download small areas directly from OSM and import into CityEngine, but then I have to stitch together the individual files. I was looking for a simpler and faster solution.
@RSGMapper the total data for Overpass is around 90 Mbyte (it crashed my browser). This is basically probably too large for a single query in QuickOSM. The main issue is that with very large extracts there is no simple way to get areas pre-assembled (Overpass-turbo does this client side).
If you have a PostGIS database I would recommend that approach. You can download a complete extract of a given bounding box from BBBike, e.g., Tampa area, in a variety of formats. If a .pbf file is uploaded to PostGIS using osm2pgsql you can pull down the building data with an SQL query which provides precisely the attributes you want, which can then readily be saved as a .shp file.
Alternatively you can also use the BBBike site to download data in a Shapefile format. This is lightly attributed, but further attributes can be added by using an overpass query to deliver those attributes in a .csv format. This can be read into QGIS as a delimited text layer without geometry and then joined to the Shapefile layer of building geometries to create a format which can then be saved with both desired attributes and geometries.
There are a couple of minor issues to be aware of which may need a bit of manual intervention: some objects in the shapefile seem to have incorrect geometries; the osm_id field in the shapefile might not be unique across nodes, ways & relations (very unlikely to clash).
One other thing the values in the height tag look to be in feet not metres which is what unqualified values should be. You may also need to cast them from strings to numbers.
ESRI CityEngine seems to support OSM XML format. You could download the data directly from overpass turbo using Export → raw data directly from Overpass API. This will allow you to download the data right to a file, instead of trying to display it in a browser window, which will only crash your browser.
A starting point for a query with buildings as way / relations only could be: overpass turbo
Import OSM (OpenStreetMap)—ArcGIS CityEngine Resources | Documentation
Thanks a lot for the info. I’ll give it a try.
Thank you. I’ve not used Overpass before, but I’ll figure it out. You’ve pointed me in the right direction. I appreciate your help. Have a great weekend.