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Ben_on_Lemmy@lemmy.ml

Why can't OSM zoom in farther? (www.openstreetmap.org)

submitted 11 months ago by pootriarch@poptalk.scrubbles.tech to c/openstreetmap@lemmy.ml

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In the web UI, OSM can't be zoomed in far enough to see the names of POIs in reasonably dense areas. I can get around this by going into edit mode, and mobile apps don't have this restriction. But the out-of-the-box experience, for non-insiders just using the web site, doesn't reveal all that OSM has to offer.

Does anyone know what the rationale for this is?

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[–] mp3@lemmy.ca 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The website relies on something called tiles to display the map, which are prerendered blocks at different zoom levels.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tiles

In order to make any kind of devices able to visualize the map, the tile server will distribute rasterized tiles, which are easy to process even on a low-powered device. The drawback is that those tiles need to be generated by the server and more importantly stored. A tile of the entire earth zoomed out will not take a lot of storage, but the higher you zoom, the more tiles you need. If you don't put a higher limit to the zoom level ,it will take an exponential amount of storage on the server, which is a problem.

[–] redd@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 11 months ago

since CyclOSM, traffic and humanitarian Style can zoom to 20.. do you know why exactly the Standard Map does limit to 19?