photon

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.

We are a young project, feel free to test and participate!

Features

• 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

Installation

photon requires java, at least version 6.

get photon

wget http://photon.komoot.de/data/photon-0.2.7.jar

download search index (31G gb compressed, 56.3 gb uncompressed, 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 x

start photon

java -jar photon-0.2.7.jar

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.

discover more of photon's feature with its usage java -jar photon-0.2.7.jar -h.

Customized Search Data

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:

java -jar photon-0.2.7.jar -nominatim-import -host localhost -port 5432 -database nominatim -user nominatim -password ... -languages es,fr

The import of worldwide data set will take some hours/days, ssd disk are recommended to accelerate nominatim queries.

Updating from Nominatim

In order to update from nominatim, you must start photon with the nominatim database credentials on the command line:

java -jar photon-0.2.7.jar -host localhost -port 5432 -database nominatim -user nominatim -password ...

A nominatim setup is also a requirement to have continuous updates. To keep in sync with the latest OSM changes run:

export NOMINATIM_DIR=/home/nominatim/...
./continuously_update_from_nominatim.sh

If 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-update

Search API

Start Photon

java -jar photon-0.2.7.jar

Search

http://localhost:2322/api?q=berlin

Search with Location Bias

http://localhost:2322/api?q=berlin&lon=10&lat=52

Reverse geocode a coordinate

http://localhost:2322/reverse?lon=10&lat=52

Adapt Number of Results

http://localhost:2322/api?q=berlin&limit=2

Adjust Language

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.

1. Include places with tag: osm_tag=key:value
2. Exclude places with tag: osm_tag=!key:value
3. Include places with tag key: osm_tag=key
4. Include places with tag value: osm_tag=:value
5. Exclude places with tag key: osm_tag=!key
6. 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=toursim:museum

Or, just by they key

http://localhost:2322/api?q=berlin&osm_tag=tourism

Results as GeoJSON

{
  "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
        ]
      }
    }]
  }

Related Projects

• 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

Contact

Let us know what you think about photon! Create a github ticket or drop us an email in https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/photon

Licence

Photon software is open source and licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0