Layers window

Keyboard shortcut: Shift+Alt+L — one of the JOSM windows

List of currently loaded layers.

Layer types

There are different types of layers. Each has a Context Menu accessed from the right mouse button which provides operations on the layer.

• OSM Data Layer (context menu): holds the OpenStreetMap data (nodes, ways, relations). During the upload process the icon changes to .
• GPX Layer (context menu): holds the GPS data loaded from your local hard disk (by using the open dialog to load GPX files) or from openstreetmap. The context menu (right mouse click on layer in layer list) allows to set special properties for different gps layers (different colors, line style, etc.).
• Marker Layer (context menu): Markers are specially identified points on the track. They come in four varieties: simple named markers, audio markers, image markers and web markers. They are created as a side effect of opening a GPX file, containing waypoints from that file, or from a set of waypoints artificially constructed using the context menu entry Make Sampled Audio Layer on the GPX layer, which produces only audio markers.
• Photo Layer (context menu): the context menu (right mouse) of a GPS layer provides the menu to import images. Using this feature allows to match digital images with the gps coordinates to ease the naming of streets (for example).
• Imagery Layer (context menu): backgrounds retrieved from a WMS, TMS or WMTS server. Examples are Landsat satellite imagery, Bing Aerial, NPE out-of-copyright Ordnance Survey maps and OpenStreetMap map tiles. See also Imagery.
• Validator Layer (context menu): highlights objects with errors or warnings from the Validator
• Notes Layer (context menu): displays the position of downloaded Notes in the Map view.

There might be more layer types depending on the loaded plugins, e.g. ​Mapillary plugin.

Layer Buttons

• click to make the layer the active layer
• click to snap/unsnap the zoom to native resolutions of this background imagery layer
• click to hide/unhide the layer

Panel Buttons

The Layers window also has several buttons at the bottom which operate on the selected layers:

Move Up

Up moves the selected layers up one row in the layer stack.

This is important when items in one layer obscure those in layers below. You can reorder layers also by drag and drop.

Move Down

Down moves the selected layers down one row in the layer stack.

Activate Layer

Keyboard shortcut: Shift+A (release keys) then [0-9] - counting from the top

Activate activates the selected layer.

It is only possible to edit in an active Data layer.

Visibility

Following hotkeys used to control visibility of top10 or bottom10 layers:

• Shift+S (release keys) then [0-9] - where 0 it the top layer; 9 - bottom
• Alt+[0-9] - counting from the bottom; 1 - first from the bottom; 0 - bottom10

Once clicked on, it offers:

• A checkbox to show/hide a layer, i.e. turns visibility of selected layers on or off. The layers are unchanged when hidden, but their contents are not shown. You can also use the following shortcuts to show/hide a layer:
• A slider to adjust the Opacity of selected layers.
• A slider to adjust the Colorfulness of selected layers.
• A slider to adjust the Gamma of selected layers.
• A slider to adjust the Sharpness of selected layers.

Colorfulness, Gamma and Sharpness are only availible for imagery layers.

For gpx layers you can choose one of 7 default colors. (Other colors are available via Customize Color in the gpx layer context menu).

Note: For ease of use you can use mouse scrolling to move a slider while the pointer is placed at the slider – no need to click-drag-release the slider picker.

Delete Layer

Delete permanently deletes the selected layers. All unsaved changes will be discarded!

If you try to delete an OSM data layer or Notes layer which contains changes, JOSM will open the Unsaved Changes window, asking to upload and/or save these changes.

Individual Buttons

There might be more buttons depending on the loaded plugins, e.g. ​RasterFilters plugin.

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