Guide 2 of 5
Download a named place
Framing a district by hand on the canvas always includes a little of its neighbours and misses a little of itself. Search the place by name instead and let the download follow the boundary that is actually mapped in OpenStreetMap.
Switch the extent to a named place
In Run download, set Extent to Named place (geocoded). A search field, a results list and a boundary selector appear underneath.
Type any name the OpenStreetMap geocoder understands and press
Enter or Search. Free-form text is fine —
Konak, Izmir, Turkey, Old Town, Prague,
Ward 5, Toronto. The lookup runs in the background, so the dock
stays responsive.
The screenshot shows a real result: searching
Konak, Izmir, Turkey returned Konak, Izmir, Aegean Region,
Turkey at administrative level 6.
Pick the right match — you decide, not the plugin
Place names are ambiguous, so every match is listed rather than the first one being chosen for you. Each entry shows its full address context and, where it exists, its administrative level — the number that tells a country from a province from a district.
Selecting a match zooms the canvas to it immediately, which is the fastest way to confirm you have the right place before downloading anything. Boundary results are ranked above streets and businesses of the same name, because a download almost always wants the area.
Common admin levels 4 is typically a state or province, 6 a county or district, 8 a municipality or city, 9–10 a borough or neighbourhood. They vary by country — the value comes straight from OpenStreetMap.
Choose how the boundary is used
The last control decides what "the place" means for the request:
- Exact mapped boundary — the request is filtered by the OpenStreetMap area itself, within the place's extent. Features stop at the district edge, so a coastal or irregular boundary does not drag in half the neighbouring town. This runs as a single request no matter how convoluted the shape is.
- Rectangular extent — the place's bounding box is used instead, and is tiled if it is large (Guide 3). Choose this when you deliberately want the surroundings too, or when the place has no mapped boundary.
Some places have no area to filter by — a village recorded only as a point, or a name whose best match is a river or a route rather than a polygon. The plugin says so in the log and falls back to the rectangle rather than running a boundary query that would quietly match nothing.
Download
The button reads Download place datasets and the summary line names the place, so there is no doubt about what will run. Results are grouped and named after both the datasets and the place.
The match you picked is passed straight to the download. The name is not looked up a second time, so the download cannot quietly resolve to a different place than the one you confirmed on the map.
How the lookup works
Names are resolved by the OpenStreetMap Nominatim service, the same geocoder behind openstreetmap.org's search box. The plugin sends only the place name you typed, to that one fixed host, at no more than one request per second in line with the service's usage policy.
If Nominatim is unreachable or returns nothing, the plugin falls back to its original method: a direct Overpass search for administrative boundaries whose name tags match. Place search therefore keeps working even when the geocoder does not.
Very large places still have a ceiling A boundary download is one request, but a whole province is still too much data for a public Overpass instance. Places whose extent exceeds 2,500 km² are refused with the measured figure, so pick a smaller administrative unit.