Observe — photos, traces, way geometry editing and more!
Posted by geohacker on 13 July 2020 in English.A little over a year ago, I wrote about Observe — a new field mapping tool for OpenStreetMap that works offline. There was a lot of interest from the community to use Observe and we got a lot of great feedback. Ever since, we have slowly been working on adding new features and improving the overall performance.
Few weeks ago, we released a new version of Observe. I’m excited to invite you all to test this version and give us feedback. I’ll highlight some of the changes in this release.
You can download the development version of Observe for Android and iOS from here. Note that this uses the OSM Dev API. If you don’t have an account, you can create one. You can read about all Observe features and how to use them in the user manual.
Taking photos and recording traces
Two important features that we wanted to add to improve the field mapping experience of Observe is being able to capture photos and record traces. Photos are critical when it comes to mapping outdoors, as we tend to take pictures of features so we can refer to them later on to create additional tags. For example, I take pictures of the sign boards of businesses so I can enter address and opening hours when I’m back at my computer.