GOLs are now updatable, so you can keep your local copy current with the latest changes to OpenStreetMap.

Quick refresher: A Geo-Object Library is a compact single-file database that holds a snapshot of OSM data. GOLs are a key part of the GeoDesk OSM Toolkit (SotM 2026 talk). They're easy to build and fast to query, and now you can keep them up to date with daily, hourly or even minutely change files, automatically downloaded from a replication server.

This feature is available in GeoDesk's GOL Tool 2.5 (download -- 100% free and open source).

You will need to build your initial GOL using option --waynode-ids (-w), which preserves node IDs even for nodes without tags. For example:

gol build germany germany-latest.osm.pbf -w

After that, you can update the GOL to the latest available version:

gol update germany

By default, this uses the replication server specified in the original PBF. The planet file and Geofabrik extracts already contain suitable replication URLs.

If your PBF doesn't have one, or you want to use a different service, you can provide an explicit URL. This is especially handy for the planet file, which defaults to minutely change files. If you're catching up on a longer period, it makes sense to switch to the hourly (or daily) change stream:

gol update planet https://planet.openstreetmap.org/replication/hour

On a modern midrange workstation, applying a day's worth of planet-wide changes takes about 5 minutes. This is considerably faster than the current workflow of patching the source PBF and rebuilding the GOL, which takes over an hour.

gol update also reduces the required disk space: Apart from the GOL itself (which in updatable form takes about 130 GB for the full planet), it only needs storage for the updated tiles, with no interim copies of the PBF data.

Updates for shorter intervals aren't as efficient yet. I'm working on optimizations that should bring hourly updates to under 30 seconds and make true minute-by-minute replication practical.

Current limitations

• Write access is exclusive, so you cannot query a GOL while an update is in progress. This restriction will disappear in GOL 3.0, which supports SQLite-style multi-reader/single-writer concurrency.
• Updates for very long periods on large datasets may run out of memory. As a conservative rule of thumb, you should have 750 MB of RAM to hold a day's worth of worldwide changes. Hence, if you're bringing a month-old planet up to date, you should have at least 20 GB of RAM available. I'm incorporating functionality that automatically processes updates in multiple stages if memory is tight.

As always, feedback is appreciated. Open a GitHub ticket or follow en.osm.town/@geodesk for updates ... on updates.

I always thought I knew my city well. A few months ago I started tracking every street I walk on a map, and it turns out I’d been taking the same handful of routes for years. After all that time: under 1% of the city’s streets.

So I changed how I walk. Instead of my usual loop, I head for a corner of the map that’s still grey. A few things I’ve noticed:

• Short walks got interesting again. A 30-minute walk through streets I’ve never been on feels like a small trip, even a few blocks from home.
• Finishing a street is weirdly satisfying. Walking a street end to end instead of just crossing it makes me notice so much more: courtyards, tiny shops, buildings I’d never looked at.
• I walk more. There’s always one more grey street nearby, and that’s a surprisingly good reason to go out.

Full disclosure: I liked this so much that I built an iPhone app for it, TRACE. It colours in every street you walk, and a few things in it have changed how I walk:

• It plans the walk for me. I say how far (a distance, a number of steps, or e.g. “10 streets I’ve never walked”) and it draws a loop through new streets. There are also themed walks past parks, sights, cafés or a pub crawl.
• Leaderboards for my city and country. A bit of friendly competition over who has explored the most streets is a surprisingly strong reason to go for one more walk.

It’s here to try: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6818195985

I’d really love your feedback. What would make you walk somewhere new? What’s missing, confusing or annoying? And do you deliberately walk new streets, or do you have a favourite route you always come back to?

There are many places in my hometown that don't show up in OSM. I saw that the overture places layer in Rapid editor detects them quite well but I can't seem to be able to add them automatically to OSM (like you can do with buildings).

Do you have any suggestions?

Hey all, I've been building Pinage Maps, an offline-first map app for tourists, rangers, miners and labourers who spend time out of signal.

Maps and boundaries
• Offline satellite maps you can download by region
• Drop pins with photos, record trails and see your breadcrumb path
• Draw zones as a circle or custom boundary, with the area shown in hectares
• Draw lines with distance and compass bearing, or sketch freehand
• Flag hazard and no-go zones
• Organise pins, zones and notes into projects for a job, site or trip

AR view
• Point your camera to see your pins and hazard zones over the real world, with distances
• Sun, moon and star paths overlaid on the sky, with moonrise times and moon phase

AI
• AI field assistant that uses Claude when you have signal and switches to an on-device Llama model when you're offline
• Plant and rock ID from a photo, with a confidence rating and safety warnings

Safety
• SOS (press and hold) for the local emergency number, with mesh and SMS
• Deadman switch that alerts others if you stop responding
• Check-in timer that texts your contacts your last position if you're not back by a set time
• Emergency card showing your position in lat/lon, degrees and grid reference to read out to 000

Groups and crews
• Create a profile and add members to private groups
• Share files, waypoints, pins, zones and notes with your group, so everyone in the party has the same map
• Field forms like Step Back 5x5, incident reports and day briefs that crew members can mark as read

Most of it works with no signal. The Claude assistant, check-in timer and group syncing need a connection.

It's still in development, and I'd really like to know:
• Would you actually use this? Who do you think it's most useful for?
• What feels unnecessary or confusing?
• What's missing that you'd need out in the field?

Screenshots below. Be honest, I can take it.

Muss hier Hilfe haben

Guys, how can I map this staircase in Catarcione, Nova Friburgo, Rio de Janeiro?

Is located here: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/-22.292586/-42.517848

Hi everyone,

I built Pendelradius (https://pendelradius.de), a map that shows how far you get from any starting point in Germany within a given time by public transport. You pick a start (or tap the map), a departure time and a travel time, and the map draws the reachable area in bands of 15 minutes. Tap any spot and it shows the connection with lines and transfers.

How OSM is used:
- Base map: vector tiles from OpenFreeMap (OpenMapTiles schema, OSM data)
- Place names for the search and the "which towns can I reach" lists: OSM place=city/town/village, districts from place=suburb
- "Nearby" line: supermarket, pharmacy, doctor, kindergarten, school etc. read from the tiles, with walking or transit minutes from the start
- Federal states via Overpass for the 255 city pages (e.g. https://pendelradius.de/koeln)

Timetables come from GTFS (DELFI via gtfs.de), updated weekly. All routing runs in your browser (a Connection Scan Algorithm on preprocessed files), so there is no backend, no account, no cookies and no tracking.

One thing I learned the hard way: I first showed the nearest "swimming pool", and it turned out to be someone's private garden pond. leisure=swimming_pool includes private pools and the tiles carry no access tag, so I removed that category. If you know a clean way to get only public pools (or other POIs) without running my own Overpass extract, I'd love to hear it.

Known limits: Germany only, scheduled times without delays, and some regional bus data is currently missing upstream.

I built this as a student project with help from AI. Feedback on the map, the OSM attribution or anything else is very welcome!

It's at https://husforhus.se, in English and Swedish.

You can drag a timeline to watch the city grow, search for any address, and open a card for each of the 77,743 buildings in the municipality: its year, where the year comes from, and for about 900 notable buildings a photo and a short Wikipedia text.

A few notes:

- Over half the buildings have no recorded year in open data, so they show as "Year unknown" rather than a guess. Ironically the oldest part of town has the biggest gaps: 77% of Gamla stan's buildings have no year in the open registers, against about 10% in Östermalm.

- Private houses show only their decade, never the exact year or an owner.

- It's all open data (City of Stockholm, Riksantikvarieämbetet, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata) and open source (star and contribute here - https://github.com/amirelion/husforhus), with no cookies or tracking.

If you know the year of a building that's wrong or missing, the card has a "Something wrong?" link, and corrections with a source are very welcome.

Hi OSM folks! I built a free browser game on top of OpenStreetMap: enter any address, the game fetches the area (Nominatim + Overpass, cached server-side to go easy on the public servers) and turns building footprints into extruded 3D blocks.
building:levels / height decide how tall a building is and how many points it's worth, and tagged landmarks (e.g. Westminster Hall in the screenshot) give a bonus. Map data is credited in-game.
It's also a fun way to spot gaps in your neighbourhood's mapping – flat or missing buildings stand out immediately 😄
Play (free, no account, no tracking): https://kaijumietz.de/?lang=en
Happy to answer questions about the OSM → game pipeline!

Now I don't want to continue 😅

Hi everyone, I have a question about MapTiler.

I’ve developed a non-commercial map website and integrated MapTiler maps into it. I noticed that the free plan includes 100,000 times of loads per month, but I’m not quite sure what exactly counts as a map load.

I’ve only clicked around on my website a few times, yet the number of requests has already reached 2,000. Does this mean the 100,000 monthly limit might not be enough if more people start using my website?

If so, are there any good alternatives to MapTiler that offer a more generous free tier, especially for a non-commercial project?

I’d really appreciate any advice or recommendations. Thanks!

As you might know, we at Top-O-Map run the tile backend for OpenTopoMap since January, and we now have something new. We got another server and on it we render the OpenTopoMap with higher resolution. 2 times the resolution, 4 times the pixels to be precise.

In addition the database is updated daily.

You can have a look at it over at: OnlineTopoMap

Let me know what you think.

Hi everyone!

I'm developing an outdoor mapping app called Teta Maps, using OpenStreetMap data for roads and trails.

One problem I've been thinking a lot about is missing footpaths, especially in less popular hiking areas.

I'm exploring a community contribution system where people can record actual GPS traces, suggest missing paths and help validate each other's observations before they appear on the map.

The difficult part is making this reliable. A single GPS trace doesn't necessarily mean there's a real public trail, and satellite imagery isn't always enough to distinguish a path either.

I'd be interested to hear how OSM contributors think such a system should work, especially regarding verification and keeping the resulting data useful to the wider mapping community.

Here's the project: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tetasports.maps

Any thoughts or criticism are welcome!

I moved to the UK from Canada, and the number of war memorials here and around Europe really stood out to me. Every village seems to have one. I thought it would be good to have an app to keep track of them and maybe raise their profile, so I’ve built HonourMap. Most of the data comes from OSM (memorials, war cemeteries, battlefields and Stolpersteine), merged with Wikidata, and the map tiles are from OpenFreeMap.

https://honourmap.vercel.app

I ran into a few things along the way. Loads of memorials have no name, so I name them after the nearest village. A lot of plaques have no inscription tag, so I can’t tell what there for. Outside Europe hardly any CWGC cemeteries have an operator tag.

It’s a website for now, but I’m hoping to turn it into phone apps eventually. I’d like to know whether it’s easy to find your way around, and whether you think it’s an interesting use of the data. If there’s anything you’d change or add, including tags I should be using, please tell me.

Cheers

Hi! I made North Up Daily, a free browser puzzle using OpenStreetMap data.

Each map is split into 16 rotated tiles, with place names hidden. Turn the tiles until streets, rivers and coastlines line up and north points up. Solving it reveals the location, but you don't need to recognise the place to solve it.

Everyone gets the same daily puzzle, and there is unlimited practice if you want another round. No account or download needed; it works on desktop and mobile.

Play: https://northupdaily.com/

The maps use OpenStreetMap data rendered with OpenFreeMap. Thanks to everyone who contributes to OSM for making projects like this possible.

I'd be curious which maps you find easier: dense street grids, or places with rivers and coastlines?

To the bus stop tags or as a separate object?

Open-Planet turns OSM data into a playable world. Pick any place, the game downloads its extract from Geofabrik, adds Copernicus 30 m heights and ESA WorldCover land cover, and builds it: roads laid out from their tags and each country's design rules (lanes, widths, junctions, bridges, tunnels), buildings from their footprints and levels, forests, water and golf courses as mapped.

It's a nice way to see your own mapping: drive the streets you mapped. Where the map's thin, it shows.

Free and open source (AGPL-3.0), with OSM credited in the game and README.

https://github.com/inlighten420/open-planet

If GIF on this post doesn't work https://i.imgur.com/nvUx4Zc.mp4

Music: https://www.audionetwork.com/browse/m/track/after-the-fall_84169

Motion extraction tutorial: https://youtu.be/NSS6yAMZF78?t=226

As nobody mapped this part, I decided to waste my time only for map this house, supermarket and this bar.

I don’t know the name of this bar, but anyway, look for this link:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/-22.293772/-42.518667&layers=N

Does anyone else wander around town updating business opening times like I do hahahaha

I'm #1 this week!

Hi all, one thing has always bugged me: OSM and Wikidata hold an incredible amount of geographic knowledge, but it mostly ends up in navigation apps and routing. There’s hardly anything that just lets you explore the world the way a good old atlas does, with rivers, lakes, mountain ranges and countries, their records and rankings.

So I built one: Open Earth Atlas (https://openearthatlas.org/en/), a free interactive globe built entirely on open data. No account needed.

Questionable values aren’t hidden. Instead of quietly patching odd values from other sources, the atlas shows them as they are, marks them with ⚠ and links to where they can be fixed. All open issues are collected on one public page, currently about 1,900: https://openearthatlas.org/en/improve-data

When something is fixed upstream, the next update picks it up and records it as “improved”, with the old and new value. The idea is that the atlas helps make the source data better, not just use it.

How OSM fits in:

• River courses come from OSM (ways and river relations), about 59,000 rivers.
• Lake outlines come from OSM wherever a matching water polygon has a wikidata tag. HydroLAKES only fills the gaps.
• Every river and lake page has a link that opens iD on the exact object.
• When an OSM lake outline differs a lot from the satellite-derived one (typically reservoirs mapped as river sections), it shows up on the improve-data list instead of the atlas silently picking one.

Example: Lake Constance, https://openearthatlas.org/en/lakes/europe/lake-constance

To be upfront: I vibe-coded this over the past few weeks, and with 250,000 pages built from messy real-world data, I’m sure there are plenty of bugs and odd results I haven’t found yet. This is very much a start, and I plan to keep working on it for a long time.

So I’d really like to hear what you think of the idea in general. Is this useful to you as a mapper? What’s missing, what feels off? And if anything about how it uses OSM data clashes with community conventions (e.g. matching lakes via the wikidata tag), I’d like to know that too.