OpenStreetMap Forum

abc26324

Member

Registered: 2010-07-10

Posts: 40

Retrieving cached imagery in JOSM

Hello all!

As many of you may already know Bing has 'got rid' of its imagery for the two highest zooms. Previously it would swap from the imagery that you currently see to different, higher resolution imagery (the same as is often used in Google Earth by the looks of it), but now it doesn't show this anymore, which for me at least is rather annoying. However I have noticed the following: sometimes when I zoom into the highest levels the now gone imagery abovementioned appears for a split second before being replaced by the lower resolution imagery and the 'no imagery at this zoom level' message thing. Now I'm not excessively knowledgeable about computing or the inner workings of JOSM, but from what I can tell JOSM has a imagery cache, so is what I am seeing JOSM displaying that imagery that has been cached and is displayed before the 'live' Bing imagery catches up. And then if so is there any way to retrieve this old cached (and higher resolution) imagery and use/display it?
(Alternatively any other way to get the old higher res. imagery would also suffice - I just really want that imagery back!)

Cheers, Will

Bernhard Hiller

Member

Registered: 2011-05-10

Posts: 1,122

Re: Retrieving cached imagery in JOSM

Yes, there is a cache on your hard disk. The images will be retrieved from the cache, if they are not "too old". I do not know how many days that means, but I think it is less than a week only.
In order to trick the WMS plugin to use older images, you must pretend that they are newer. "touch" (that's a utility on Linux systems, also a Windows version is available) the files and give them a file date in the near future (3 month in the future normally works).
For each tile, the WMS stores also a "*.tag" file. I do not know how they might interfere - but in case of doubt you can delete them (do not delete the *.png files!).

abc26324

Member

Registered: 2010-07-10

Posts: 40

Re: Retrieving cached imagery in JOSM

Thanks for the info - but im not quite sure what to do. Is this 'touch' thing a little program or something? How do I do it?

nevw

Member

From: SE Queensland, Australia

Registered: 2013-04-11

Posts: 447

Re: Retrieving cached imagery in JOSM

Here is the windows vsersion of the touch
http://sourceforge.net/projects/touchforwindows/

If using unix use 'man touch'.

abc26324

Member

Registered: 2010-07-10

Posts: 40

Re: Retrieving cached imagery in JOSM

Thanks again for your response. I have a problem though - I download the download, 'extract all' from the folder, and all that is inside is touch.exe and when i click on it nothing happens. Am I doing something wrong?

(on the plus side I have worked out that JOSM will definitely display recent files from the cache when offline, so once I can change all the times on the cache files it should work fine).

nevw

Member

From: SE Queensland, Australia

Registered: 2013-04-11

Posts: 447

Re: Retrieving cached imagery in JOSM

I'm a mac user and am not familiar with windows touch but these links give a little info on a touch prog - it may be a different one than you used but may be more user friendly for you.
There does not seem to be much in the way of instruction that I can find.

Funduc Software Touch http://www.funduc.com/fstouch.htm
File Date Touch http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Fil … ouch.shtml

I suspect that if you just drop the file/point/open the file onto these touch programs they will by default change the timestamp to the current time.

As an example, here is how it's done in unix  http://linux.101hacks.com/unix/touch/ and at wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_%28Unix%29
Any windows command line touch programs may use same syntacs/switches but I would try the above links first instead because they will at least give you a more familiar window.

Last edited by nevw (2014-05-17 10:34:46)