Photon is an open source geocoder built for OpenStreetMap data. It is based on elasticsearch - an efficient, powerful and highly scalable search platform.
Photon was started by komoot and provides search-as-you-type and multilingual support. It's used in production with thousands of requests per minute at www.komoot.de. Find our public API and demo on photon.komoot.de.
All code contributions and bug reports are welcome!
For questions please send an email to our mailing list https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/photon
Feel free to test and participate!
Photon software is open source and licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0
- high performance
- highly scalability
- search-as-you-type
- multilingual search
- location bias
- typo tolerance
- filter by osm tag and value
- reverse geocode a coordinate to an address
- OSM data import (built upon Nominatim) inclusive continuous updates
photon requires java, at least version 8.
Download the search index (53G gb compressed, worldwide coverage, languages: English, German, French and Italian). The search index is updated weekly and thankfully provided by GraphHopper with the support of lonvia.
Make sure you have bzip2 or pbzip2 installed and execute one of these two commands in your shell. This will download, uncompress and extract the huge database in one step:
wget -O - http://download1.graphhopper.com/public/photon-db-latest.tar.bz2 | bzip2 -cd | tar x
# you can significantly speed up extracting using pbzip2 (recommended):
wget -O - http://download1.graphhopper.com/public/photon-db-latest.tar.bz2 | pbzip2 -cd | tar xNow get photon, at least 0.3, from the releases and start it:
java -jar photon-*.jarUse the -data-dir option to point to the parent directory of photon_data if that directory is not in the default location ./photon_data. Before you request photon ElasticSearch needs to load some data into memory so be patient for a few seconds.
To use an older version of ElasticSearch please download the data from here (Nov 2017) via wget as described above and use version 0.2.7 of photon (Oct 2016).
Check the URL http://localhost:2322/api?q=berlin to see if photon is running without problems. You may want to use our leaflet plugin to see the results on a map.
To enable CORS (cross-site requests), use -cors-any to allow any origin or -cors-origin with a specific origin as the argument. By default, CORS support is disabled.
discover more of photon's feature with its usage java -jar photon-*.jar -h.
If you need search data in other languages or restricted to a country you will need to create your search data by your own. Once you have your nominatim database ready, you can import the data to photon.
If you haven't already set a password for your nominatim database user, do it now (change user name and password as you like, below):
su postgres
psql
ALTER USER nominatim WITH ENCRYPTED PASSWORD 'mysecretpassword';Import the data to photon:
java -jar photon-*.jar -nominatim-import -host localhost -port 5432 -database nominatim -user nominatim -password mysecretpassword -languages es,frThe import of worldwide data set will take some hours/days, ssd disk are recommended to accelerate nominatim queries.
In order to update nominatim from OSM and then photon from nominatim, you must start photon with the nominatim database credentials on the command line:
java -jar photon-*.jar -host localhost -port 5432 -database nominatim -user nominatim -password ...A nominatim setup is also a requirement to have continuous updates. To keep nominatim in sync with the latest OSM changes and to update photon with nominatim afterwards run:
export NOMINATIM_DIR=/home/nominatim/...
./continuously_update_from_nominatim.shIf you have updated nominatim with another method, photon can be updated by making a HTTP GET request to /nominatim-update, e.g. with this command:
curl http://localhost:2322/nominatim-updatehttp://localhost:2322/api?q=berlin
http://localhost:2322/api?q=berlin&lon=10&lat=52
Increase this bias (range is 0.1 to 10, default is 1.6)
http://localhost:2322/api?q=berlin&lon=10&lat=52&location_bias_scale=2
http://localhost:2322/reverse?lon=10&lat=52
http://localhost:2322/api?q=berlin&limit=2
http://localhost:2322/api?q=berlin&lang=it
Filter results by tags and values
Note: not all tags on link in the title are supported. Please see nominatim source for an accurate list.
If one or many query parameters named osm_tag are present, photon will attempt to filter results by those tags. In general, here is the expected format (syntax) for the value of osm_tag request parameters.
- Include places with tag:
osm_tag=key:value - Exclude places with tag:
osm_tag=!key:value - Include places with tag key:
osm_tag=key - Include places with tag value:
osm_tag=:value - Exclude places with tag key:
osm_tag=!key - Exclude places with tag value:
osm_tag=:!value
For example, to search for all places named berlin with tag of tourism=museum, one should construct url as follows:
http://localhost:2322/api?q=berlin&osm_tag=tourism:museum
Or, just by they key
http://localhost:2322/api?q=berlin&osm_tag=tourism
{
"features": [
{
"properties": {
"name": "Berlin",
"state": "Berlin",
"country": "Germany",
"osm_key": "place",
"osm_value": "city",
"osm_type": "N",
"osm_id": 240109189
},
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "Point",
"coordinates": [
13.3888599,
52.5170365
]
}
},
{
"properties": {
"name": "Berlin Olympic Stadium",
"street": "Olympischer Platz",
"housenumber": "3",
"postcode": "14053",
"state": "Berlin",
"country": "Germany",
"osm_key": "leisure",
"osm_value": "stadium",
"osm_type": "W",
"osm_id": 38862723,
"extent": [
13.23727,
52.5157151,
13.241757,
52.5135972
]
},
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "Point",
"coordinates": [
13.239514674078611,
52.51467945
]
}
}]
}- Photon's search configuration was developed with a specific test framework. It is written in Python and hosted separately.
- R packge to access photon's public API with R