One of the most satisfying aspects of contributing to OpenStreetMap for me is walking a previously unmapped hiking trail, adding it to OSM, and seeing it appear on waymarkedtrails.org (and later in various hiking-oriented Android apps).
Recently I had the chance to survey a short waymarked trail that was completely unmapped (both the physical path and the waymarking). Here are the "before and after" screenshots from hiking.waymarkedtrails.org.
As well as mapping the trail, I was able to add a picnic table, antenna, memorial plaque, and information board.
I also added some landcover details. This turned out to be the most time-consuming part, mainly because I had to drastically reduce a large polygon that was supposed to represent olive groves but in fact included large swathes of pine forest and bare rock - a remnant of a CORINE import I think.
The excursion wasn't just about surveying of course - the reason I wanted to map the trail in the first place was because it has great views of the Guadalhorce Valley and the town of Álora.
A few non-mapping-related photos on Pixelfed (partly an excuse to see what Pixelfed links look like on Mastodon):
A few days ago I walked the Monte Redondo trail near Álora, signposted as SL-A 031. It is a short walks that connects to the longer Monte Hacho trail, with views towards the Sierra de Las Nieves to the west, and the town and castle of Álora to the east. #hiking @mountains #alora #malaga
@crmccreary My basic approach is
- walk the trail, recording a track and taking photos of everything that might be useful (information boards, guideposts, junctions, condition of the path)
- pass the GPX trace and photos to desktop, open in the JOSM map editor
- map the physical paths ("ways" in OSM terminology) if they are not already there
- create a hiking route ("relation" in OSM terminology") and add the ways to the relation
- check on waymarkedtrails.org.
@crmccreary That explanation may or may not make sense depending on whether you have used OpenStreetMap for other things. If you haven't, I would suggest starting here and making some simple contributions initially (e.g. add a shop or another single point of interest):
@crmccreary If you are comfortable making simple contributions to OSM, you could learn more about mapping hiking routes here:
@SchwarzeLocke oh so it's built in? I never remember what's built in and what's a plugin these days.
I have mostly used it to correlate across devices when I was doing some photomapping with a GoPro timelapse.
@SchwarzeLocke @InsertUser I am also unsure at times with JOSM if I am using a plugin or not, but in this case think it is built in as described in see "Arranging photos on a GPS trace" on the Wiki.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/JOSM/Photomapping
Where you do need a plugin, I think, is if you want to save the location to the EXIF of the photo files. But that's not needed purely for mapping.
Of course none of this helps much if you don't have a track...
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