Stamen tile service shuts down 31.10.2023

[almereyda]

Describe the bug

Stamen have announced that their tile map service is being shut down end of October 2023. As the tile server URLs are not hard coded, server administrators are suggested to migrate to the new locations. I will comment on the two Stamen base map layers provided by the OSM FR instance.

Watercolor will remain available via the Cooper Hewitt Collection, and via a cooperation with Stadia maps (see Terrain below). They will be served on:

• watercolormaps.collection.cooperhewitt.org

About Watercolor Maps in the Cooper Hewitt collection:

Watercolor Maptiles is a web-based, open-source mapping tool created by Stamen Design and built on OpenStreetMap data. The site you are about to enter is Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s fully-functioning, interactive, and open-source copy of Stamen’s Watercolor Maptiles. In 2021, the museum added the website to its design collection by duplicating it to ensure long-term live access, and we will maintain the site into the future. Stamen’s original site also continues to exist. Smithsonian’s version of the site, experienced here, now lives alongside Stamen’s original site and will continue to exist after the original site has reached the end of its natural lifespan.

This end of "its natural lifespan" has now arrived.

They serve the tiles from: https://watercolormaps.collection.cooperhewitt.org/tile/watercolor/{z}/{x}/{y}.jpg

Terrain continues to live with Stadia Maps behind a login wall. Not-for-profits receive free accounts with up until 200.000 tile requests per month. Together with Toner, it has been converted into vector tiles. These are not openly available.

Expected behavior

All choices for background map tiles in uMap continue to work.

Additional context

While it can be assumed there will be mirroring efforts for Watercolor, or that the collector allows fair use of its tile service, it appears Terrain styles will have to be dropped without an explicit agreement (account, contract) with Stadia Maps in place.

/cc @davidbgk @yohanboniface

[yohanboniface]

Thanks @almereyda for the info!

I'll deal with that, which means I think:

• [ ] removing Terrain from available tilelayers
• [ ] running a SQL to replace Terrain tilelayers from Map.settings by the default one
• [ ] replacing Watercolor URL by the new one
• [ ] running a SQL to replace Watercolor tilelayers from Map.settings by the new URL

[almereyda]

Should we ask the Cooper Hewitt collection, if they support embedding Watercolor tile layers in third party applications, or if they intend to restrict their use for their own "historical" web map?

I could reach out to them, because I'm very interested. (Note: We're using Watercolor for the Berlin urban gardening map @gartenkarte since 2012, have early been in contact with Stamen for printing purposes, and always got very helpful responses.)

[yohanboniface]

I could reach out to them

That would be very helpful, thanks :)

[almereyda]

Give me a week or two. I will return back here well before the end of the month.

[almereyda]

I've written to them now and CC'ed you with your OSM.fr alias.

[yohanboniface]

Thanks a lot! :)

[almereyda]

We a go!

Citing from an email reply that excluded you again (at least I tried):

We're awaiting some updates to our version of the site (unfortunately with a little bit of a time lag relative to Stamen/Stadia's announcement) to clarify just this issue.

Our website will (soon) have instructions that confirm that your proposed use is consistent with our acquisition and stewardship intentions. We want to make sure developers can continue to have access to the (ca 2014) tileset.

I'm pasting below our (forthcoming) "how to use" guidelines. We include examples of code for Leaflet and other libraries in our collections github (https://github.com/CooperHewittCollection). Please enjoy the tiles for your own projects with our enthusiastic consent

---

How can I use Watercolor Maps and maptiles?

We are happy for you to use these tiles for your own projects, with the following attribution:

Map tiles by Stamen Design, under CC BY 3.0. Data by OpenStreetMap, under CC BY SA. <COPY HTML>. In all other respects, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum makes this site available under www.si.edu/termsofuse and Smithsonian Institution's Privacy Statement.

You can take screenshots to create images for use in your own open-source projects, or you can embed the map into your own websites using the “embed” html below, or access the tiles from our servers for your own mapping applications.

To embed your current map view, use the following html:

[...]

Since the original project was made in 2012-2014, the raster image tiles you see here are no longer up to date. But, the original code is available to produce fresh watercolor map tiles. Here is Cooper Hewitt Collection’s Github repository, which contains both the archived code for generating Stamen’s Watercolor Maptiles from Open Street Maps basemap data, as well examples of how to use the original raster tiles using free and Open-source tools Leaflet, MapLibre, and OpenLayers.

The repositories are:

• CooperHewittCollection/watercolor
  • forked from stamen/watercolor, which has newer commits
• CooperHewittCollection/watercolor_examples: Examples to use Stamen's Watercolor Maptiles for Leaflet, OpenLayers and MapLibre libraries via Smithsonian/ Cooper Hewitt

The latter also has the correct ZXY URL template for fetching the tiles, and not what I originally wrote above:

https://watercolormaps.collection.cooperhewitt.org/tile/watercolor/{z}/{x}/{y}.jpg

This went well (:

[almereyda]

@yohanboniface Happy anytime you can get to this.

http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/de/map/berliner-gartenkarte_8100#11/52.4991/13.3549 is now affected, for example.