Highlighting the wrong building using coordinates – is there a fix?

[pasek]

I've been trying to set a highlight on a building that is positioned via coordinates for a while now, and for some reason, it keeps highlighting the building across the street instead. Is there a fix for this?

[ReikanYsora]

Hello :)

There is no "highlight this building" setting, and that is the root of it. The card does not know your address; it takes the real footprints around your coordinates from OpenFreeMap, which is built from OpenStreetMap data, and picks as your home the building whose outline CONTAINS your point. If no outline contains it, it falls back to the nearest footprint instead, with no distance limit inside the 250 m it fetches. That fallback is what you are seeing: the card is not highlighting the wrong building, it is telling you
that nothing at your coordinates is a building as far as the map data is concerned.

So it is one of two things, and you can tell them apart in about a minute.

1. The coordinates are not precise enough. Address geocoders very often return the street centreline or a parcel centroid rather than the roof, and a few metres in the wrong direction is enough to put the point on the road, where the nearest footprint is the house opposite.

2. Your building is simply not in OpenStreetMap. Worth a serious look in your case: on your screenshot there is exactly one building drawn in the entire scene. For a residential street that is not normal, and it suggests the mapping around you is very sparse. If your own house is not mapped, there is nothing at your position for the card to pick, whatever coordinates you give it.

How to check both at once: open openstreetmap.org and go straight to your point with https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/<latitude>/<longitude>, using the exact values from your card config. Two questions answer themselves: does the view centre on your roof or somewhere else, and is your house drawn as a building at all.

• If the centre is off, take the corrected coordinates from OSM itself (right click on the middle of your roof) and put those in home-latitude / home-longitude.
• If your house is not drawn, it can be added to OpenStreetMap. That is the real fix, and it benefits every map that uses OSM, not just this card. Note it will not appear instantly here: OpenFreeMap rebuilds its tiles from OSM periodically, so allow some time.

One thing that will otherwise waste your afternoon: the card caches the footprints in your browser, keyed on your position rounded to four decimals, which is about 11 metres. So nudging your coordinates by a few metres reuses the same cached data and nothing appears to change, and a newly mapped building will not show up either. After changing anything, open the card editor, go to the Reset section and use "Reset data cache", then reload.

Cheers ;)

ReikanYsora / Jérôme