Why can't OSM zoom in farther?
Why can't OSM zoom in farther?
OpenStreetMap is a map of the world, created by people like you and free to use under an open license.
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?
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.
since CyclOSM, traffic and humanitarian Style can zoom to 20.. do you know why exactly the Standard Map does limit to 19?
The main URL points to this:
Not exactly a solution, but you can change layer to CyclOSM and you can zoom further
I know all that jazz about that map not being for mere mortals (why did they add routing then?). Anyway, what I usually do is right click and "Query map features here" or something along those lines which usually gets me what I want. Or use Osmand on Android or DuckDuckGo's map feature
That's odd, I swear it used to be able to zoom a lot more.
I would recommend using a dedicated openstreetmap app or service.
The real answer you wanna hear is:
Soon no more! As they will move from pixel based tiles to vector based rendering which will massively speed up load times and allow any zoomlevel you want.
https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2024/02/11/2024-announcing-the-year-of-the-openstreetmap-vector-maps/
osm-carto is for mappers, not users