OSM Maps

Countries of Earth

Various Zoom Levels

'Snappy Maps'

(OSM = Open Street Maps)

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This Countries Of Earth 'Snappy Maps' page

! Under construction !
Initially each 'OSM tile at z,x,y' link is to
a single tile containing (most of) the country.
Eventually the single tiles are to be
replaced by a zoomable capability
--- a 'snappy map' capability ---
for the 190-plus countries of Earth.

< Go to Table of Contents, below >
(SKIP THIS INTRO)

INTRODUCTION :

This site presents a Cities and Countries 'Slippy Maps' page. That page consists of links to 'slippy maps' --- for about 1,200 cities and countries.

Those are links to the 'openstreetmap.org' home page with a latitude and longitude and zoom-level specified --- appropriate for an initial view of each city and country.

The 'openstreetmap.org' home page uses some complex JavaScript --- consisting of hundreds of JavaScript functions --- to allow the user to pan and zoom an OSM 'slippy map'.

The OSM slippy map is made up of 256x256 pixel PNG file 'tiles', which cover most of Mother Earth --- at about 18 different 'zoom-levels' --- each zoom-level twice as magnified as the previous one.

Those hundreds of JavaScript functions used at the OSM site support many additional features (besides zoom in, zoom out, and pan) such as allowing for

  • putting one (or more) markers on a map
  • choosing among different map styles (by presenting a choice of 'layers')
  • adding notes to the map
  • saving an image file of a current view of the map

The OSM tiles around a given latitude and longitude (and zoom-level) can be displayed in a web page using URL's of the form:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=z/lat/lon

where z is an integer zoom-level, and lat and lon are latitude and longitude, in decimal degrees. Example:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=4/38.0/-97.0

I can see that, if one simply wants to be able to explore a map (without features like adding markers and notes), there is a possibility of navigating around a map with 3 simple functions

  • zoom in
  • zoom out
  • change center of map

To do this, using the OSM 'tiles', it is possible to write 3 JavaScript functions (that take parameters z, lat-tile-integer-ID, lon-tile-integer-ID) to build new map views of those three types.

An additional JavaScript function will be needed to act as a 'wrapper' to those 3 functions --- in order to ask the user which of those three new-map views to create --- when the user clicks on a map tile.

    At least one more JavaScript function may be required if we want to offer the user a choice of different tile servers to use. Non-OSM tile servers have different server names --- and they often use a slightly different format to pass the z,lat,lon parameters to the tile server. This JavaScript function --- when passed a tile server ID --- can build the appropriate URL to fetch a tile from that tile server.

I call this kind of map exploration 'snappy maps' --- instead of 'slippy maps' --- because the navigation is reminiscent of snapping icons to a grid structure on a desktop --- but, instead of desktop icons, we are dealing with map 'tiles'.

Furthermore, we will be dealing with jumping around (on and to) an array of map tiles --- say, 2-by-2 or 3-by-3 or 4-by-4 tiles --- instead of smoothly scrolling over tiles and parts of tiles at the edges of the window.

In this 'snappy tile' implementation, we will always be dealing with whole tiles --- an integral number of tiles. So our map view will always be a multiple of 256 pixels --- horizontally and vertically.

    I was hoping to get the 'snappy tile' Javascript code written soon. However, it may be a few years (perhaps 2020 or beyond) before I return to this page and write that Javascript code.

    In the meantime, there are 'OSM Slippy Tile' links below that provide the more 'feature-full' OSM slippy tile map facility.

With 'snappy tile maps', I hope to be able to do essentially the same thing that can be done with 'slippy tile maps' --- namely :

EXPLORE THE WORLD! This one web page is meant to facilitate that --- in a 'snappy' way, instead of in a 'slippy' way.

Island hop. Continent hop. Without jet lag.

For example, island hop from Malta to Sicily (part of Italy) to Sardinia (part of Italy) to Corsica (part of France). Then explore Rome and the Amalfi coast (in Italy). Hop over to Venice (in Italy). Then visit the country of Croatia. And, after that, visit the islands of Greece. Then explore Istanbul (in Turkey) and Cairo (in Egypt).

    You can use a find-text-in-this-page option of your web browser to find the names of these countries in this web page.

    You could try doing all the navigating from the initial Malta map.

    OR, you could use the Malta map link. Then the Italy map link, Then the Croatia map link. Then the Greece map link. Then the Turkey map link. Then the Egypt map link.

    Since each country-map-link opens in a separate window (or tab), you can keep open those you need to help with navigation, and close those that you no longer need.

    AND, you can keep the window containing this page open, to use other country links.

Follow the streets of exotic cities of the world. Follow the highways between those cities.

If following a highway takes you to another country, you can use a country-link on this page to take you to the middle of that next country --- or keep panning (re-centering) your current map.

Country Data :   (some sources of latitude-longitude data)

There are about 240 'countries' or 'administrative areas' on Mother Earth --- although some are not totally self-governing. Some are 'protectorates' and various other vestiges of colonial times (colonizations/take-overs by the U.S., English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Belgians, Italians, Turks, Austrians, Germans, Danish, Australians, China, USSR, etc.).

Some examples of 'vestiges':

  • U.S. - Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands and some Pacific Islands
  • English - Gibraltar and British Virgin Islands and the Falkland Islands
  • French - some Pacific Islands

Various lists of 'countries' ('administrative areas') can be seen at Wikipedia

and at other sites such as the Database of Global Administrative Areas (GADM).

You can look for other lists, along with latitude-longitude data, with a

It will generally be easier to find the latitude-longitude coordinates of a major city of the countries rather than the coordinates of the 'geographic center' of each country --- although the Wikipedia web pages on countries seem to have good coordinates that are at or near the center of each country.

In any case, the latitude-longitude coordinates for each country below may be approximate --- but they are intended to get us 'into the ball park'.

Organization of this page:

I considered organizing the links to countries (and their maps) within groupings --- by about six or seven 'continents' or 'regions' of the world --- such as North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania.

But I decided to simply order the country-links down this page, alphabetically, by their English (U.S. English) names.

This avoids issues such as whether to categorize a country as European or Asian.

Nature of the links below:

When you click on a link (indicated by a triplet of integer numbers: 'z,x,y'), a tile (or, eventually, a rectangular array of tiles) will be shown in a separate window (or tab) of your web browser.

NOTE:
Because the 'Standard' OSM tile images contain text names (such as country and city names) in the LOCAL language and alphabet, tiles for countries in the Middle East and Asia, for example, do not have names in English.

    Fortunately, OSM provides alternative tiles ('Transport' and 'Cycle' style) with SOME labels in English, as well as in the local language-and-alphabet, for the Middle Eastern and Asian (and other) countries.

    Alternatively, there are a few other organizations that provide tile servers whose tiles have English labels. Those organizations seem to come and go --- probably burned out by all the processing (and commitment) involved in keeping the tiles up-to-date.

      The electric bill for all the computer processing --- that their 'tile rendering farms' do to repeatedly update billions of tiles --- must be something to behold. That is more heat generation to add to the atmosphere --- along with all the 'bitcoin' mining-processing --- and all the furnaces and combustion engines of the world.

    As we see in the numbers-of-tiles section referenced above, if OSM (or any other tile-rendering organization) is to supply a package of tiles, all with English labels, that generosity would require 91 billion tiles.

    And if you repeat that for French, German, Spanish, Russian, Greek, Hungarian, Hebrew, Vietnamese, and about 40 (?) other languages, you are talking a lot of tiles --- and a lot of terabytes --- and a lot of processing to continually regenerate the tiles from updated OSM 'base' files containing a variety of 'raw' data. (A lot of that data is not seen in the tile images.)

    Since some 'tile rendering farms' may do a nicer job with English-language labels on the tiles (nicer than the various OSM styles), this page may be updated someday to provide some alternatives to using the 'tile server' facility at 'openstreetmap.org'. You can go to the 'Servers' section at the bottom of the Cities and Countries 'Slippy Maps' page to see examples of some possible alternative tile styles.

Besides the 'snappy-map'-links below, there are Wikipedia country-info links.

If you need more information on a country, you can click on the country name to go to a Wikipedia page for the country. You can follow further links on the Wikipedia page for even more info.

    UNDER CONSTRUCTION:
    The links below that show 'z,x,y' instead of a triplet of integers are yet to be determined. (The y,x latitude-longitude OSM tile locator integers are to be determined from the decimal-degrees latitude-longitude of the countries). In the meantime, the 'z,x,y' (non-numeric) links simply show the whole world map --- the OSM 0/0/0.png file.

    ALSO UNDER CONSTRUCTION:
    The several 'snappy tiles' JavaScripts have not been written yet. When they are ready, the single tile displays below will be replaced by the 'snappy maps' zoom-in, zoom-out, and re-center capabilities.

Enough with the intro.

Below is the 'Table of Contents' --- the alphabet.

For a country whose name starts with a given letter of the alphabet, you can jump to a corresponding section of country-links on this page by clicking on the appropriate letter of the alphabet.

Or simply scroll down this page.

When you get to a country of interest, simply click on the 'z,x,y' (3 integers) link at that country name and an OSM map tile (256x256 pixel PNG file) will appear. That tile is intended to contain (most of) the country within the tile. (Eventually, an array of tiles is to appear --- instead of a single tile.)

    EVENTUALLY:
    The plan is to make the country tile(s) 'clickable' so that one can zoom into 'sub-tiles' of the country at deeper-and-deeper zoom levels --- down to OSM zoom level 18 or 19. Also, the plan is to provide zoom-out and re-center capabilities.

Note that the initial zoom level for the larger countries will be 2, 3, 4, or 5.

For small islands, the initial zoom level could be like that suitable for medium-sized to small cities --- about 12, 13, or 14.

Table of Contents:

(links to sections of this page, below)

(The links-to-maps are in alphabetical order by
country-name within each 'country-names' section.)

A     B     C     D     E     F     G     H     I     J     K     L     M    

N     O     P     Q     R     S     T     U     V     W     Y     Z

End of Table of Contents.
Start of Sections of COUNTRY MAP LINKS.

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A

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B

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C

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D
E
F

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G
H

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I
J
K

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L
M

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N
O

  • Oman
    Latitude , Longitude: 21.0 57.0
    OSM tile at z,x,y: z,x,y
    OSM Slippy Map
    (on the eastern point of the Arabian peninsula - bordered by Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates)

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P
Q

  • Qatar
    Latitude , Longitude: 25.5 51.25
    OSM tile at z,x,y: 5,20,13
    OSM Slippy Map
    (on the south side of the Persian Gulf, across from Iran;
    bordered by Saudi Arabia to the south and west;
    the United Arab Emirates are nearby, to the east)

R
S

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T
U
V
W
Y

  • Yemen
    Latitude , Longitude: 15.0 48.0
    OSM tile at z,x,y: 5,20,14
    OSM Slippy Map
    (on south end of Arabian peninsula - across Red Sea from Eritrea - bordered by Saudi Arabia and Oman)

  • Yugoslavia (split up)
    Latitude , Longitude: null null
    (around 1991-1992 broke up into countries including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Serbia, and more)

Z

  • Zaire (See 'Democratic Republic of the Congo' entry above.)

  • Zambia
    Latitude , Longitude: -15.0 30.0
    OSM tile at z,x,y: 4,9,8
    OSM Slippy Map
    (landlocked in Africa - bordered by Angola, Dem. Rep. Congo, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia)

  • Zimbabwe
    Latitude , Longitude: -20.0 30.0
    OSM tile at z,x,y: 4,9,8
    OSM Slippy Map
    (landlocked in Africa - bordered by South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique)

The plan is to make each of the country-maps zoomable in the sense that:

  • You can click on an 'initial' link for the country that will display a web page containing a 3x3 array of 9 tiles, at an appropriate zoom level, containing an image of the country.

  • On each page containing an array of tiles (at a particular zoom level), you can click on a tile and that will display a web page containing a 3x3 array of tiles, one zoom level down, 'based' at the tile that was clicked.

A JavaScript function that builds and displays an array-of-tiles web page --- for a given set of z,x,y numbers --- and a given tile server name --- will be used to build and display each succeeding zoomed-in web page.

In addition to zooming in, it will be quite useful to be able to zoom out --- and to 're-center' a display (similar to a 'pan' function).

The plan here is basically to make 'zoomy-and-re-centery maps', but not 'slippy maps'. For short, they will be called 'snappy maps'.

There can be some advantages to these 'snappy-maps' --- such as a much smaller JavaScript functions library to do the map navigation. And, such as making it rather easy to capture maps in a single (large) rectangular PNG image file --- in a 'more precise' way than is typically available with 'slippy maps' --- an 'edges always on tile boundaries' way.

    NOTE1:
    Since it is difficult, for many countries, to find a tile that encompasses most of the country in the center of the tile, it will probably be advisable to use an initial 3x3 (or rectangular) array of tiles containing the country --- in place of a single tile display.

    NOTE2:
    We plan to limit the tile-fetching to NO MORE THAN about 9 tiles 'at a time' (in less than a few seconds) in order to avoid putting a very intense load on the OSM tile servers.

      Unfortunately, in OSM forums and programming forums, people keep asking for guidelines on what constitutes too many tiles to ask for at a time --- but they get no clear guidelines from OSM --- in the forums or in the OSM web pages (in 2018). I think the 9-tiles-at-a-time limit seems reasonable. They put me (and many others) in the position of guessing.

      That said, I can see in the OSM 'slippy maps' utility that, when the tiles are slow to draw, in my web browser, there are at least 8 tiles being used to do each OSM slippy map display in the OSM window. So a maximum of 9 tiles 'at a time' seems to indeed be a reasonable limit.

    Some alternate 'open' tile servers may be utilized in the future --- using URL's such as

    http://tile.stamen.com/#toner/{z}/{x}/{y}.png.

    In fact, for some of the single-tile country images above, I used the 'toner' tiles at stamen.com to get English text labels --- especially for Middle East and Asian countries.

Initial z,x,y integer values for the countries :

A 'MAPtools' 'tkGooie' script at freedomenv.com was used to determine an appropriate zoom-level integer and x,y integer values to use for a given decimal-degrees latitude-longitude location of a country.

The 'z,x,y' integer values for each country above are intended to be used to eventually choose an initial multi-tile map position for each country, from which to navigate (zoom-in, zoom-out, and re-center).

Thank You :

I would like to thank the people at OSM --- and stamen.com --- for making tiles available on their servers --- tiles rendered using the 'raw' data files and image renderers that they maintain.

Their 'open' attitude makes it possible for others around the world to experiment with various ways of presenting the data.

Bottom of this page of
"Snappy" OSM-based MAPS of COUNTRIES of EARTH.

To return to a previously visited web page, click on the Back button of your web browser a sufficient number of times. OR, use the History-list option of your web browser.
OR ...

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Page was started 2018 Jun 14.

Page was changed 2018 Jun 22.
(Added the 'snappy maps' moniker.)

Page was changed 2018 Jun 26.
(Revised and added to the 'Introduction' sections.)

Page was changed 2018 Jul 08.
(Added 'meta' info in the HTML for this page.)

Page was changed 2019 Jan 11.
(Added css and javascript to try to handle text-size
for smartphones, esp. in portrait orientation.)

Page was changed 2019 Feb 10.
(HTML changes due to reorg of the OSM Maps Menu of this site.)

Page was changed 2019 Sep 11-13.
(Added the 'OSM Slippy Map' links.)

(About 100 'z,x,y' tile location integers
remain to be specified. Those integers will specify the
central tile for the 'snappy map' of each country.)