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?
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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
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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/
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