Adding streets to Open Street Maps

As Monty Python is likely to say, "And now for something completely different."

An area that I go to for birding is adding new streets and has also extended a footpath. While I was out walking the footpath I discovered that Open Street Maps (OSM) had part of the footpath but not the new part. What is Open Street Maps you ask!?!?!? Well... it is a crowd source map of the entire world. It is capable of representing most anything and everything so it has footpaths, streets, businesses, houses, plots of land, etc.

So, a few days ago, I got a GPS track and learned how to fix the footpath in OSM using the GPS track to help me. Yea for me!!

But a few mournings ago, I had a "brilliant" idea!!! I could use my drone to take aerial images of where the new streets were and use that to help me add the new streets. Why!?!?!? Because I'm bored I suppose.

Well... it turns out that doing this is way more complicated than I had imagined. Along the way, I discovered other Open Maps such as Open Aerial Map and Open Drone Map.

Open Drone Map has software that will crunch the 48 images I took with my drone, piece them together and add metadata tags to scale, rotate, and precisely place the images so that mapping software can use it. Then upload the resulting image to Open Aerial Maps which then provides an interface back to Open Street Maps with the existing part of the map with the new image added in. It is then a matter of drawing the new features into OSM. Kinda fun...

Here is the view I had just as I finished editiing showing the Open Street Map data and the image that the Open Drone Map created.