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 very young project, feel free to test and participate! The previous version based on solr is accessible in the deprecated solr branch.

• 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 6.

get photon

wget http://photon.komoot.de/data/photon-0.2.4.jar

download search index (31G gb compressed, 56.3 gb uncompressed, worldwide coverage, languages: English, German, French and Italian)

wget -O - http://photon.komoot.de/data/photon_data_021_150112.tar.bz2 |
bzip2 -cd | tar x
# you can significantly speed up extracting using pbzip2:
wget -O - http://photon.komoot.de/data/photon_data_021_150112.tar.bz2 |
pbzip2 -cd | tar x

start photon

java -jar photon-0.2.4.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-0.2.4.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:

java -jar photon-0.2.4.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.

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

java -jar photon-0.2.4.jar

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

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

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

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

http://localhost:2322/api?q=berlin&lang=it

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

{
  "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.

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

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