Useful Companion Apps for OsmAnd

[A Thompson]

Over years of taking an interest in free Android mapping apps, I have found a few that directly enhance OsmAnd. Anyone know any others?

1. Map Bookmark / Streetview Player / GPX Viewer is amazing! You can share a route to it from OsmAnd and see it animated in Google Streetview. When you're editing Openstreetmaps, you can drop a pin in Osmand, share to this app and pick "streetview" and refresh your memory about what it might look like. In Google Maps, you can share a location to this app, select "Osmand" and sometimes it transfers, for me sometimes it crashes.
   
2. Map2Geo :Transfer to other map is great for transferring locations between map apps via the "share" mechanism. Works great for Google Maps to OsmAnd but warns that a lot of internet data is required. The developer has other free map-related apps worth a look.
   
3. Acastus Photon gives online OSM address/POI lookup using Photon, can send to OsmAnd. A much more forgiving search than the online Nominatim search currently available in OsmAnd.
   

I hope someone finds something useful here, or maybe can contribute more!

[Bart Eisenberg]

When hiking, I'm a big fan of Custom Maps, a labor of love from a Google developer, which allows you to georeference almost any online map, including PDFs, that you can download to your device. As well as photos of trailhead maps you take yourself. I often use in tandem with OsmAnd. 

Here's my video on it: https://youtu.be/qVuQenIzwik.

[Greg Troxel]

A Thompson <thomp...@gmail.com> writes:

> 1. Map Bookmark / Streetview Player / GPX Viewer
> <https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.donutpond.sharecoordinates> is

> amazing! You can share a route to it from OsmAnd and see it animated in
> Google Streetview. When you're editing Openstreetmaps, you can drop a pin
> in Osmand, share to this app and pick "streetview" and refresh your memory
> about what it might look like. In Google Maps, you can share a location to
> this app, select "Osmand" and sometimes it transfers, for me sometimes it
> crashes.

You really should not be using google streetview in any way when editing
OSM. Please reread the google terms and not that they are totally
incompatible with the OSM CT.

If you want to look at it because you are about to drive and find that
helpful, and you like sending your proposed route to google, by all means use it :-)


> 2. Map2Geo :Transfer to other map
> <https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=catfish.android.map2geo> is

> great for transferring locations between map apps via the "share"
> mechanism. Works great for Google Maps to OsmAnd but warns that a lot of
> internet data is required. The developer has other free map-related apps
> worth a look.

> 3. Acastus Photon
> <https://f-droid.org/en/packages/name.gdr.acastus_photon/> gives online

[Greg Troxel]

Bart Eisenberg <bartei...@gmail.com> writes:

> When hiking, I'm a big fan of Custom Maps <http://www.custommapsapp.com/>,

> a labor of love from a Google developer, which allows you to georeference
> almost any online map, including PDFs, that you can download to your
> device. As well as photos of trailhead maps you take yourself. I often use
> in tandem with OsmAnd.

Thanks for pointing that out. Luckily it is open source, but it seems
you can't built it without a google maps api key, or so says the README.
I guess the idea is that it uses google maps for georeferencing. I am
surprised that's allowed by the TOS!

Does anyone know of a viewer, or perhaps support in OsmAnd, for maps that
are already georeferenced, such as geotiff or geopdf, that one might
make with qgis?

There is also in f-droid:

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.hu_berlin.informatik.spws2014.mapever/

which is very old and I don't know if it is maintained or not. You
georeference with your gps and the map, after moving some, with no
external data.

[A Thompson]

You really should not be using google streetview in any way when editing
OSM.  Please reread the google terms and not that they are totally
incompatible with the OSM CT.

Agreed.. But I chose my words carefully! I find streetview useful for refreshing my memory about an area that I have visited,, then I often find I remember things that are missing from OSM. But it does require discipline to map from memory not streetview, so your comment is well made! 

[Xavier]

Do remember that OSM's official position is to be beyond reproach:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Whiter_than_white

And the general reply whenever anyone asks about using something such
as Google street view for any form of assistance while mapping in OSM
is to not even look at google street view at all for any purpose while
adding data to OSM.

The OSM point is that if one does not even look at Google streetview,
then there is no opportunity for Google to complain.

[A Thompson]

Thanks for explaining this so well, Xavier. I only map what I've seen with my own eyes unless I'm correcting freely available information, but you have taught me to be even more careful. I always want to learn how to contribute better.

Once again, I have hijacked my own thread by over-sharing! I wish I could edit my original post,  but the "Map Bookmark..." app is super-useful alongside OsmAnd, and is not easy to find!

[Akkana Peck]

> Bart Eisenberg <bartei...@gmail.com> writes:
> > When hiking, I'm a big fan of Custom Maps <http://www.custommapsapp.com/>,
> > a labor of love from a Google developer, which allows you to georeference
> > almost any online map, including PDFs

Greg Troxel writes:
> Does anyone know of a viewer, or perhaps support in OsmAnd, for maps that
> are already georeferenced, such as geotiff or geopdf, that one might
> make with qgis?

OsmAnd can view a geotiff if you turn it into tiles. First:

gdal_translate filename.tiff filename.mbtiles

If you want several zoom levels:
gdaladdo -r nearest filename.mbtiles 2 4 8 16

Then use this script:
https://github.com/tarwirdur/mbtiles2osmand
like this:
mbtiles2osmand.py filename.mbtiles filename.sqlitedb

Copy filename.sqlitedb to OsmAnd's tiles folder, and then
it should be available as an overlay or underlay in OsmAnd.

if you prefer a directory of small tiles, like web slippy maps use,
you can:
mkdir tiles
gdal2tiles filename.tiff tiles

Other options: There's something called MAPC2MAPC if you have
Windows; Bart has a video tutorial on that. And there's something
called Mobile Atlas Creator (MOBAC) which is supposedly cross
platform, but it looked much more complicated than the gdal steps.

...Akkana

[Bart Eisenberg]

Here's the video: https://youtu.be/Y_fekLfcUOc

MAPC2MAPC uses GDAL as part of its format translation function, presenting a friendlier work flow  than GDAL's command line interface.  

QGIS has a QDAL plugin.  But if I remember your blog post, Akkana, that's not enough to translate a Geotiff to an OsmAnd-compliant format entirely within QGIS.  Yes?

[Akkana Peck]

Bart Eisenberg writes:
> QGIS has a QDAL plugin
> <https://docs.qgis.org/2.8/en/docs/user_manual/plugins/plugins_gdaltools.html>.

> But if I remember your blog post, Akkana, that's not enough to translate a
> Geotiff to an OsmAnd-compliant format entirely within QGIS. Yes?

I haven't actually used the gdal-tools plugin because running gdal
commands directly looked much easier, but I think you're right.
It looks like the only tile-like file the plugin can make is vrt,
and I don't think OsmAnd can handle a vrt directly. A web search
for vrt to sqlite finds several options, but it looks like it would
come down to using gdal and mbtiles2osmand from the command line anyway,
so there's no obvious win from using the plugin.

If anyone wants to try it (please write it up afterward!), the link
above has a warning that it's outdated; the current link is
https://qgis-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/plugins/plugins_gdaltools.html

...Akkana

[klaeufer]

On Friday, July 17, 2020 at 12:35:38 PM UTC-5, Akkana Peck wrote:

Bart Eisenberg writes:
> QGIS has a QDAL plugin
> <https://docs.qgis.org/2.8/en/docs/user_manual/plugins/plugins_gdaltools.html>.  
> But if I remember your blog post, Akkana, that's not enough to translate a
> Geotiff to an OsmAnd-compliant format entirely within QGIS.  Yes?

I haven't actually used the gdal-tools plugin because running gdal
commands directly looked much easier, but I think you're right.
It looks like the only tile-like file the plugin can make is vrt,
and I don't think OsmAnd can handle a vrt directly. A web search
for vrt to sqlite finds several options, but it looks like it would
come down to using gdal and mbtiles2osmand from the command line anyway,
so there's no obvious win from using the plugin.

QGis Processing Toolbox > Raster tools > Generate XYZ tiles (MBTiles) should generate MBTiles entirely within QGis (from the selected layers).

AFAIK, you would still have to run mbtiles2osmand on the command line. For those who prefer a GUI experience, it would sure be nice to have a plugin for this.

Konstantin 

[A Thompson]

QGis Processing Toolbox > Raster tools > Generate XYZ tiles (MBTiles) should generate MBTiles entirely within QGis (from the selected layers).

AFAIK, you would still have to run mbtiles2osmand on the command line. For those who prefer a GUI experience, it would sure be nice to have a plugin for this.

Alternatively, QGis Processing Toolbox > Raster tools > Generate XYZ tiles (Directory)

Then you have to recursively batch rename *.jpg to *.jpg.tile which unfortunately is ridiculously obscure.  But then you can just drop the directory hierarchy into OsmAnd's tiles folder and it works fine without generating sqlite - a directory hierarchy is how OsmAnd caches online tile sources.

Back when QGIS needed the QTiles plugin, I wrote a couple of suggestions on recursive renaming in this post.

One advantage of this approach is that if you later want to save space on your device, you can just delete a subdirectory to sacrifice a zoom level.

It's so tantalising! If OsmAnd could recognise tiles called *.jpg as well as *.jpg.tile then QGIS would be an all-in-one user-friendly solution. The problem would also be solved if QGIS would allow us to specify the filename extension when generating tiles.

 

[Majka]

On Saturday, 18 July 2020 05:14:57 UTC+2, A Thompson wrote:

It's so tantalising! If OsmAnd could recognise tiles called *.jpg as well as *.jpg.tile then QGIS would be an all-in-one user-friendly solution.

The need to rename the tiles has another disadvantage - several map apps use the same tiles (jpg/png) without the renaming. For example, if you are using OsmAnd and Locus for geocaching at the same time, to use such map in both, you would need the same tiles twice - once renamed and once as generated.