Personally, I like to micromap. I’ve mapped individual trees, poles, benches, and trashcans, for example. I also like to map forested/scrub areas. Buildings themselves are also kind of fun to map, so long as I have the building plugin installed to JOSM.
I know it’s not the main target of OSM, but I like mapping opening times of amenities like restaurants or shops. Often enough I search a Café on OsmAnd to find missing opening times, then I go have a croissant there and map it after. It feels like making a gift to the next person going there by using OSM
I think this is actually one of the most important things to map to help with adoption of using OSM data as a daily driver! There are so many missing POIs.
Yes and EveryDoor is the app to use for this in my opinion!
It feels really cool to map landcover (forests, farmland etc) and then see how much better the map looks compared to the gray emptyness that was there before!
I’m also always adding and updating POIs when out and about. I like to use EveryDoor to when focusing on POIs. It’s really easy to add opening hours and a ton of other tags. Even if the tag is not cataloged/preconfigured in EveryDoor you can add tags manually really easily.
Just going for a walk and filling in missing data with Street Complete. It’s like an exploration video game except I’m actually helping!
Cameras ! Got to keep myself high on the leaderboard
Things (Fire hydrants, benches, drinking water fountains, bicycle parking, trashcans) and Places (opening hours, website and contact info, adding new local businesses)
My favorite is marking rocks in the sea. I live in an area with a rocky shoreline. I wish it was legal to chart the seafloor for depth.
I mapped so much trees and all that small stuff in my hometown and someone removed them because it would be to hard to keep it up to date :(
How long ago was this? Their deletions could be reverted. That’s not a good reason to delete someone’s contributions.
I think it was 2 years ago
That’s messed up! That isn’t a valid reason to remove them to be honest, I would probably revert their changeset which removed yours and push back…
I also like to micromap, I like being able to do a lot of edits and polish on a very small area I can focus on, mainly because once I’m done I can look at the map and see an area that is maximally mapped where there is basically nothing left to add. I’ve mapped hundreds of individual parking lot spaces before, adding reserved numbers and handicapped, the little flowerbed islands and their trees, fire hydrants and fdc connections on buildings, light poles, foot paths and desire paths, community park benches, grills, pet waste bag dispensers, bike parking, really anything at all I can find an osm wiki page for.
This is usually after I’m done doing sidewalks, crosswalks, tactile paving, and adding missing "access_aisle"s where parking lot kerb cuts connect sidewalks to parking lanes which make a huge difference in walking direction routing.
I’d love to extend my micromapping into some indoor mapping, but learning that seems a bit daunting.
When I’m out and about somewhere I don’t have the ability to micromap, I add restroom and air conditioning tags to restaurants and update hours, phone, website, etc.
I like spotting benches and mapping them. I have hundreds of benches already mapped.
I like mapping the streetlights setting in street complete.
Boy, have I got pleasant news for you.
Edit: I completely misread this. I get now you meant the street lighting, which can be a lot of fun to survey! If a little creepy sometimes.
This is awesome! I also do map some streetlights however I did not see much of usecases yet. Now that changed!
Fair warning that Carto seemingly tends to update about twice a year and that this was merged maybe a couple weeks after an update. So you’ll be waiting for it to show up…
… but it will show up.
It’s something I do when I’m out in crowded areas. It helps take my mind off people and gamify being outside. I try to map everything in the area with street complete.








