I was going to add the Hurkling Stone to the map, but found on editing that it was there already. Why is this feature not labelled on the map? There are other similar features that you don't see when using the map. This one is at https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=53.2957&mlon=-1.5975#map=16/53.2957/-1.5975&layers=D asked 24 Jan '20, 10:51  arbuthnot |
2 Answers:
Different maps show different things. There's so much that could be shown that any map that tried to show everything would look really confusing. Here's one that shows it. (full disclosure - that's one that I created to show this sort of thing) answered 24 Jan '20, 11:50  SomeoneElse ♦ |
Not every feature is shown on any particular map. There are other discussions on this topic, see for example https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/102/i-have-made-edits-but-they-dont-show-up-on-the-map answered 24 Jan '20, 11:50  Andy Allan |
Thanks for the answers. The map created by SomeoneElse is what I was looking for, for mapping walks from directions given by leaders which use these sort of features.
I am just getting used to the way that at different zoom levels the visibility of feature labels changes, it seems to be controlled by whether they overlap with neighbours, which make sense, but sometimes gives odd results, so the parking at Birchen Clough https://map.atownsend.org.uk/maps/map/map.html#zoom=15&lat=53.42983&lon=-1.8403 is visible at zoom 13 and zoom 18, but not in between. I understand that deciding what to show is a hard problem; I suppose ideally there would be user controls to set priorities for chosen features, or for what the tradeoff is between visibility and clarity.
Yes, that's exactly it. In this case the name of the "place=locality" Birchen Clough Bridge is obscuring at at those zoom levels where it both is displayed and would overlap. Essentially with maps that have one fixed style you can't have "everything louder than everything else"; something has to take precedence. The alternative is to use a map that is created "on the fly" from the data (such as you'd see in the OsmAnd app on Android) - there you can to some extent turn on and off various features.