rotate map view

[steffen.flemming@…]

It would be nice if one could rotate and tilt the view of the map, because:
i stand on a position and take several photos into different directions.
allthoug all photos are geocoded and reference points are visible
it would be easier to map the things shown if one could rotate the map so the direction of a way
seen on the photo (it goes straigt forward) is the same of the mapview.
Link to the data:
​http://www.openstreetmap.org/index.html?mlat=53.98770160337839&mlon=11.202652704801043&zoom=18
atteched you will find the original photo and how it could be.

[skyper]

Ticket #2717 has been marked as a duplicate of this ticket.

[skyper]

Ticket #6342 has been marked as a duplicate of this ticket.

[osm.ruben@…]

This feature would be much appreciated. I find myself tilting my head all the time when editing ways in detail, it would be far better for my neck to rotate the viewport instead.

[Don-vip]

Ticket #14842 has been marked as a duplicate of this ticket.

[bastiK]

Btw., it is possible to rotate the map, but probably not as convenient as you may have hoped:

First find the UTM zone for your region and the corresponding EPSG code. For example for UTM zone 34 it would be EPSG:32634. Then, to rotate the map by 30 degrees, use a custom projection with the following parameter string:

+init=EPSG:32634 +gamma=30

[Don-vip]

+init=EPSG:3857 +gamma=30 does not work, is it only for some projections?

[bastiK]

Yes, gamma is only a parameter for Oblique Mercator (omerc) and Transverse Mercator (tmerc).

[Klumbumbus]

Ticket #16896 has been marked as a duplicate of this ticket.

[anonymous]

No progress after 10 years? Seriously? It would help a lot with mapping not horizontal features. Now it is too painful.

[michael2402]

There has been some internal work to make this possible, but a lot of components / layers do not support it yet.

[stoecker]

Replying to anonym:

No progress after 10 years? Seriously? It would help a lot with mapping not horizontal features. Now it is too painful.

No real demand in 10 years actually says "Not worth bothering with".

[ha]

Replying to stoecker:

No real demand in 10 years actually says "Not worth bothering with".

This is a very disturbing comment. The reason why there's "no demand" is because people don't see any progress in 10 years and don't see the point of raising it again. There's no response in 10 years and it's unlikely a few more comments would make it better. It's a sad fact but not why we should take it as-is.

[stoecker]

Replying to ha:

Replying to stoecker:

No real demand in 10 years actually says "Not worth bothering with".

This is a very disturbing comment. The reason why there's "no demand" is because people don't see any progress in 10 years and don't see the point of raising it again. There's no response in 10 years and it's unlikely a few more comments would make it better. It's a sad fact but not why we should take it as-is.

Well, maybe we understand our own bug tracker a bit better than you think? Features which people really want get duplicated tickets all over the time with differing descriptions and use cases. A request which sits here for such a long time without a single duplicate is not really needed. And please don't think starting to make duplicate tickets now will change the situation.

[Klumbumbus]

Ticket #19791 has been marked as a duplicate of this ticket.

[Klumbumbus]

Ticket #20083 has been marked as a duplicate of this ticket.

[stoecker]

Ticket #20408 has been marked as a duplicate of this ticket.

[anonymous]

Please, please add this, it would be so useful.

[astrid]

Commenting to +1 the number of people who would appreciate this feature. Thanks!

[communities+osm@…]

Would appreciate this feature as well as it would improve usability in certain cases a lot.

[anonymous]

+1, or would it be better if I made a duplicate ticket?

[richlv]

Usecase: a PicLayer image with text. Having it rotated to match the actual features sometimes makes text very hard to read.

[trybowski]

I've came to this Trac just to file a request for this feature. Since it is already there, I'd like to express my strong support for it.

My use case is that my neighbourhood is rotated in about 30 degrees. It makes working on mapping unnecessarily harder. If I could rotate the view to have my buildings aligned to horizontal and vertical axis it would be easier to map, edit and spot errors.

Thanks in advance.

[stoecker]

Guys, we have a voting feature in the wiki. Please use it.

Also the main issue here is not to express support, but we need somebody, who actually does the work.

[trybowski]

Replying to stoecker:

Guys, we have a voting feature in the wiki. Please use it.

Do you mean the voting at the top of this page? It's hardly noticeable...

Also the main issue here is not to express support, but we need somebody, who actually does the work.

I'm sorry stoecker, but you're contradicting yourself. Is it maybe possible that you're personally not convinced about this request and therefore you're attempting to undermine the meaning of this ticket?

20 months ago you wrote that you'd judge request's popularity by number of its duplicates and that this ticket had none. In fact by that time it already had four duplicates. You said that this was not a popular request, so was “not worth bothering with”. Now you say that expressing support for the request is not really important, because somebody needs to actually do the job. That's understandable, but isn't is true for ALL the requests? So why single out this one by writing such a thing?

I would gladly help if I had the skills, which I sadly don't.

Let's face the truth: 1. Over the years 14 people explicitly supported this ticket. 2. Supposedly you already have some work done on this. 3. There are threads over internet where people search for OSM editors having the feature. And after all let's be frank: rotating a map is a BASIC of the BASICS.

All the above calls for some basic acknowledgement of this request and not dismissing it as “not worth it”. So you really should at least acknowledge that it is a useful, wanted feature; and you should try to analyse the workload needed and perhaps set a release date for which you're aiming with this. Otherwise you're just being unfair.

Please don't respond along the words that you don't really have to anything, because it's an open source, volunteer-based, unpaid project. We know. But If that would be the answer, then no point having the wiki or this tracker at all.

All the best and no offence intended.

[stoecker]

Replying to trybowski:

Also the main issue here is not to express support, but we need somebody, who actually does the work.

I'm sorry stoecker, but you're contradicting yourself. Is it maybe possible that you're personally not convinced about this request and therefore you're attempting to undermine the meaning of this ticket?

20 months ago you wrote that you'd judge request's popularity by number of its duplicates and that this ticket had none.

We are judging the popularity by many different factors, e.g. Votes, Duplicates, Activity, Complexity. 20 months ago all indicators said this is a rather uninteresting feature request. I simply reacted to a comment of somebody who like you claimed to know better how the development works.

My personal opinion does not matter here as it does not change anything, but as you ask: I don't need the feature myself, but can see that in certain situations it may be helpful.

Please don't respond along the words that you don't really have to anything, because it's an open source, volunteer-based, unpaid project. We know. But If that would be the answer, then no point having the wiki or this tracker at all.

If you don't want to hear that it's your problem, but that fact simply does not go away. The bug tracker is for collecting bugs and ideas. But it does not decide what the developers do, that's their individual decision.

Use the existing voting feature and the ticket will be climb up in report/14. That may increase attraction for a developer. Apparently no developer was willing yet to start the implementation of this feature.

To ENSURE a feature gets implemented either do it yourself or find someone doing it for you - core developers will help with reviews and in case of trouble.

[michael2402]

Replying to stoecker:

Apparently no developer was willing yet to start the implementation of this feature.

I did. I have parts of it as patch file. One of my branches allows distortions for background imagery (including rotating the map view and using a transforming background imagery to a projection that was not the original one): ​https://github.com/michaelzangl/josm/branches
Just search here for the not merged branches, there are not many.

… There it is, rotating / transforming images: ​https://github.com/michaelzangl/josm/compare/mapview-extract-imagery-rendering#diff-dc023e8197d4c25694c8e2c79d5830e8aba4c748e668557c84f98b881fb90805R79

Implementing a rotation after this change is easy: Create a new projection that uses the old one as a base and rotates around a east/north point, then set that as projection.

[ChillyDLesby]

I strongly support the request for rotating maps. I am mapping from aerial imagery in desert areas, and with the sun shinig from below (South) it is often very hard to tell a ridge from a valley. Most of the time you see an inverse relief, which is not helping.

[anonymous]

Replying to stoecker:

Well, maybe we understand our own bug tracker a bit better than you think? Features which people really want get duplicated tickets all over the time with differing descriptions and use cases. A request which sits here for such a long time without a single duplicate is not really needed. And please don't think starting to make duplicate tickets now will change the situation.

So you judge feature necessity by the number of people failing to use the bugtracker's Search function, and needlessly creating duplicates? Aren't votes enough?

[anonymous]

I support this request.

[chaz@…]

I would find this feature very useful.

[m.tintor@…]

Hello, at Kodiak Robotics we use JOSM for mapping. Map View rotation would be very useful for us (instead of requiring fixed North orientation).

[krza]

This would clearly be a very, very, very helpul feature. It would even help if it would apply to the data layers only (so background layers would automatically be turned off in case of a rotation). But if all layers would be rotated, this would of course be the best solution.

Did not read each single post above, so maybe it was mentioned already: Best would be 2 ways to set a rotation angle:

• by a given degree value (delta or absolute)
• by selecting 2 nodes which define the horizontal resp. vertical line (the closer one is applied)

This would not only safe my neck from injuries but would also make selections much easier in many cases. Yes, there is the lasso selection available but the classic rectangualar selection is much easier.

To make it perfect, you would also be able to define horizontal, vertical or even angled helper lines (as in Photoshop or something). Currently I always draw them in the layer but this is impractical in certain cases and also adds the risk that you forget to remove them again before uploading.

[taylor.smock]

Ticket #22449 has been marked as a duplicate of this ticket.

[jellej00]

I really support this request and it's a bloody shame that 15 years has past and rotating the map in JOSM is still not possible.

[stoecker]

Replying to jellej00:

I really support this request and it's a bloody shame that 15 years has past and rotating the map in JOSM is still not possible.

If it's a bloody shame, then you are surely willing to implement it yourself or pay for commercial programming to do so.

Otherwise rethink your attitude.

[stoecker]

I mentioned this ticket in ​https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/google-summer-of-code-2024-call-for-project-ideas-and-mentors/108515/7, so if sombody thinks that's worth the effort and can and will mentor it, add a proposal to GSoC2024 :-)

I think we have the majority of the necessary infrastructure available in JOSM core now that such an approach could have success.

[skyper]

Replying to stoecker:

I mentioned this ticket in ​https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/google-summer-of-code-2024-call-for-project-ideas-and-mentors/108515/7, so if sombody thinks that's worth the effort and can and will mentor it, add a proposal to GSoC2024 :-)

There are some more tickets with the keyword gsoc-candidate (query). Is the keyword useful? How about #18992 which is restricting linking between presets and currently already a problem in some presets.

[taylor.smock]

Note for whoever does the implementation: Rapid supports map rotation as of 2.3.

They use alt + right mouse button for rotating and shift + <-|-> (5 degree increments). We cannot reuse the keyboard combination (it is used by default for shifting nodes left/right), but we should be able to reuse the keyboard+mouse combination without conflicting with anything.