Buildings

Tracing buildings takes good imagery and patience. Take your time and pay attention to angularity, alignment between buildings and reflecting the regularities between buildings.

Select new Area (Keyboard Shortcut: 3) in iD and put a node down at every corner of the buildings roof. Double clicking will complete the area. If you havent formed perfect right angles at every building corner don’t cry, you can ‘shift-click’ on the area to bring up the contextual area menu and use the tool to orthogonolize the area (Keyboard Shortcut: s).

Buildings should be traced as outlines of where the building meets the ground. This last piece is important. The roof outline is often easier to see in the imagery so you’ll find it often traced in OpenStreetMap but it’s wrong. If you see that the outline of the roof you traced does not align with where the building meets the ground you can ‘shift-click’ the path and use the tool to drag the path to the correct position.