Alright, OpenStreetMap (OSM) tiles are now an option on the iNaturalist website. You should be able to select them as an option anywhere on the site that you see a map and, like the way things currently work, your tile choice will be “sticky” for your account and display on all maps until you choose a different set of tiles. For example, here’s the tile chooser on a taxon page map:
Important details:
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OSM does have a limit for tile loading and it may block us if our usage goes over their tile limit, so if for some reason it stops working, that may be why. If that does happen, we’ll evaluate the cost of storing and serving OSM tiles ourself. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t choose OSM on iNat, but do keep that in mind. We’re going to track usage as well as we can and see how things go.
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we are still using Google Maps’ code for map view and place search, we’re just adding the option to view one kind of OSM map in the maps viewer that comes from Google. So place search in places like Explore and the Uploader still use Google Maps for search - they’ll just display OSM maps. So this likely won’t help users in places like China, unfortunately, or people who want to de-Google their lives.
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it was looking good when we tested it on our test server, but there may be bugs, of course. If you find one, please make a report in Bug Reports.