Id: Allow users to filter / customize what appears on the background imagery list

[boothym]

Seems like the recent change to exclude imagery older than 20 years means OS town plans with an end_date in the 1800s are not showing - e.g. https://github.com/osmlab/editor-layer-index/blob/gh-pages/sources/europe/gb/NLS-OSTownPlan-Edinburgh1849-1851.geojson?short_path=b028702 - but the URL works in the custom field.

[bhousel]

Yes this is intentional.. Is there a compelling reason to offer imagery from the 1800s in the default iD? Remember our primary persona that we design for is someone who has never edited a map before, or is just getting started with OpenStreetMap.

I get that it might be useful for a site like OpenHistoricalMap (seems down?), but a fork site could have their own imagery database.

Also as you pointed out, those imagery sources do still work in the custom field, if you're doing some kind of research project or something.

[boothym]

I'd say the most compelling reason to offer the imagery is because these are good quality maps of Scottish town centres. They can be used to help trace buildings where aerial coverage is poor, at an angle, OS OpenData StreetView buildings are obscured by roads or not detailed enough. A lot of the buildings are still standing so it makes sense to use it.

Although I wrote 1800s, the oldest one is 1849 and many are from the 1890s - so about the same time as the NLS 1892-1905 map which is currently available in iD. In fact, plenty of old Scottish/UK are maps available to choose from in iD, most of which are much less detailed than the town plans.

And I understand iD is for beginners, but the only reason I know about these maps is because I saw one was available when editing my own town. It would be a shame for a newbie to look in the list of backgrounds when mapping their town centre and not find detailed imagery just because it's more than 20 years old!

You posted last year that this issue only affects NLS-OSTownPlan imagery: https://github.com/osmlab/editor-layer-index/issues/175#issuecomment-240698321 - do you know if this has changed?

[boothym]

Here's an example from: https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit#map=19/55.95560/-2.77838 - add the custom background to see it: http://geo.nls.uk/maps/towns/haddington1893/{zoom}/{x}/{-y}.png

[Abbe98]

Off Topic Warning

Ohh @bhousel so when merging 2.0 into OpenHistoricalMap/iD is there any additional changes required to make sure all the old base maps and imagery will show up?

...yes OpenHistoricalMap.org is currently down as a result of a disc crashing a few weeks ago... :-/

[SK53]

Detailed historical maps of town/city centres are surprisingly useful for mapping here-and-now. They often have excellent detail of major buildings which still exist and which are often difficult to get right from aerial imagery. Some further comparisons here (OSM buildings vs map from 1861).

Some of the ones for Scotland and London have interior details too for public buildings and thus represent a potential source for indoor mapping!

We also use NLS 1:25k and 7th series maps a fair bit in UK, both are OOC and therefore over 50 years old. The Irish Townland mapping project relied on maps from 1939, many actually based on originals from 1900s.

Of course these comments don't help in identifying which older maps are more-or-less useless for contemporary mapping. In practice I suspect they are mainly useful in Europe, and I think only British. & Irish mappers have had major recourse to OOC maps: at least in part because of a shared heritage in map copyright.

[pnorman]

Ohh @bhousel so when merging 2.0 into OpenHistoricalMap/iD is there any additional changes required to make sure all the old base maps and imagery will show up?

You can't use iD with the OpenStreetMap editor-layer-index because it includes imagery which can't be used with OpenHistoricalMap, only iD. Because you have to use your own imagery index you will probably want to change a bunch of imagery stuff.

Of course these comments don't help in identifying which older maps are more-or-less useless for contemporary mapping.

When the dozens of OOC maps appeared in the index (then editor-imagery-index) I asked if they were all useful for normal mapping and the answer from the GB community was yes. If they weren't useful, I'd have removed them. If this issue was raised then, I'd have said that iD's behavior of filtering layers useful for normal mapping was a bug and if there were layers that weren't useful it was an editor-imagery-index bug.

Now that it's changed to editor-layer-index, the layers don't need to be useful to editors it does make sense to filter, but I don't care particularly about this anymore since I a) don't edit in regions where this is an issue, b) don't contribute to or use editor-layer-index.

[Abbe98]

You can't use iD with the OpenStreetMap editor-layer-index because it includes imagery which can't be used with OpenHistoricalMap, only iD. Because you have to use your own imagery index you will probably want to change a bunch of imagery stuff.

@pnorman I don't, my question was if the date limitation was hard-coded into iD(which I wondered earlier because this was an issue in this repo and not in the editor-layer-index one)...

[bhousel]

my question was if the date limitation was hard-coded into iD(which I wondered earlier because this was an issue in this repo and not in the editor-layer-index one)..

@Abbe98 The date cutoff code is here.

It's not in iD itself, but rather in the code that processes the raw imagery.json file that we pull from the editor-layer-index project.

[bhousel]

This will probably upset some people but, I think:

• By default, iD should only contain background sources that are reasonably current (I think 20 years is a very generous threshold)
• If you want to map from older imagery: use the custom field, or run a fork of iD.

Again, my primary design goal here is to make iD great for people editing openstreetmap.org who don't have a lot of experience with map editing and don't know that historical data in OSM is a contentious issue.

For every person who thinks maps from the 19th century are neat to look at (which they are!), there are 1000 people who just want to get their business added to OSM. They don't want to wade through a menu of imagery with dozens of old maps.

I'm totally fine with the old maps being in editor-layer-index, but it should have end_date set so we can filter it out.

Also really happy to see people using iD to edit on OpenHistorialMap, and hope we can support editing from old maps there.

[boothym]

Sorry for not replying to this sooner. The main problem I have is at the moment, the code only affects one set of old maps, of which one or two will show up in around 50 specific locations in Scotland. It just seems weird to only exclude those maps.

If you do not want old maps in iD, then you should really be consistent and add end_dates to the various other out of copyright maps available for the UK & Ireland.

However, it would be a shame to lose access to old maps for experienced mappers but also inquisitive new mappers, who might not know about them. It would also be a pain to load each one as a custom map, just to see if they have useful information. And anyway, how would a new mapper get to know there are custom maps available?

...there are 1000 people who just want to get their business added to OSM. They don't want to wade through a menu of imagery with dozens of old maps.

That's fine, and since iD opens up with Bing as default, and that should be sufficient. But in this case we're talking about detailed town plans, which in many cases will be useful for building outlines and working out exactly where your business or shop is, especially if Bing/Mapbox isn't clear.

Personally, I think the best solution is to include all maps, but put those old than 20 years behind a "historic imagery" drop-down, much like the "adjust imagery offset". That way new users don't see the old maps by default, but they will still be available.

[boothym]

How about something like this? (Obviously with the arrow point down, as if it had been opened!)

[bhousel]

Sorry I missed the comment @boothym . I agree it would be great to give users some ability to customize the background imagery list. This would include stuff like: removing backgrounds that the user never wants to see, adding multiple custom backgrounds (that can be named and saved for later), maybe grouping them.

The "solution" of just dropping all the imagery > 20 years old is good enough for now, but I realize it doesn't meet everyone's needs. I just wanted a quick fix to avoid showing a list with like 50 background imagery radio buttons.

[boothym]

I just wanted a quick fix to avoid showing a list with like 50 background imagery radio buttons.

Unfortunately the change didn't really fix anything, as it only removed one or two backgrounds at specific locations - there are still nine other backgrounds shown in the list.

To solve the problem, I could add an end_date to the nine backgrounds in https://github.com/osmlab/editor-layer-index/tree/gh-pages/sources/europe/gb (all those except the town plans).

However that would mean these will disappear from iD's background list, which is something I'd like to avoid.

I feel you should go for one of these options, either:

• keep the > 20 years old check, but add the end dates to all imagery (remove the old backgrounds)
  OR
• remove the > 20 years old check to allow all imagery and keep working on improving the background options (aerial/historic categories etc).

[SK53]

Just looking at the map list, and realise that Surrey Air Survey (c. 2009) is FAR less useful for day-to-day mapping than the historical layers. This is because it has been superseded by virtually every other imagery layer, and although fairly recent and detailed, is more likely to lead to erroneous mapping than the historical stuff.

If we want to reduce number of backgrounds in the editor it may help to identify the type of background, - something like aerial, topomap, townplan, road map, qa - and apply different age filters to each class.

Notional scale (for maps) is also relevant: the larger the scale, the more useful detail there is on historical maps.

One last point: large areas of SE England still have polygons & other features derived from NPE Map: it's useful to crosscheck to see if these were reasonably accurately mapped in the first place. They often aren't in which case I delete them and redraw using imagery because it's much faster.

Some potential changes can be made:

• Drop OSM OS 7th series & 1:25k (the server died and has never been resurrected.

• Drop Bartholomew half-inch. Very old and I don't think much used for any real mapping (something like 25 objects tagged with this as source)

• Surrey Air Survey, Scottish Popular edition & New Popular Editions are mostly important, IMO, for checking edits against the original source.

[bhousel]

@boothym, @SK53 : For specific suggestions on changing what appears the imagery list, please open issues in the editor-layer-index project.

[SomeoneElseOSM]

Quick question about the "We filter out the historic layers from iD" comment at https://github.com/osmlab/editor-layer-index/issues/456#issuecomment-374963039 - I can edit using NLS 1:25k historic at
https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit?editor=id#map=15/52.5845/-3.4650 . Is this by design or not? There are obviously arguments for and against whether it should be allowed or not (trying not to get into that); just wondering if everything was working as it should.

[grischard]

This isn't by design, that layer is missing an end_date property.