OpenAerialMap (HOT / Open Imagery Network)
- Free allowance
- Free hosting for anyone with nowhere to publish.
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- emailno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- per-object-cap100 GB/file
- Evidence
- reported5 sources; a third party said so
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-05checked 2026-10-21 (inherited); stale on 2026-11-05
| Free tier | Free hosting for anyone with nowhere to publish. The rewrite of the uploader is explicitly scoped to 'Handle files up to 100GB with resume capability, using S3 multipart upload with presigned URLs (direct browser-to-S3)'. No per-account total published; the catalog holds 21,460 datasets. unit mixed; metered on unstated |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
geospatial raster only (GeoTIFF/COG orthomosaics); target 100 GB/file with resumable S3 multipart; account needed for API access and upload |
| Identity | email email — sign in with a Google account (documented third-party walkthrough: 'Sign in using your google account'), no affiliation or review |
| Egress | free — and note the two-tier model: providers who already have cloud storage can 'Register a catalog', in which case OAM stores only metadata and links out ('Indexing uses none of your bandwidth and gives OAM no rights over the imagery') |
| Per-object cap | 100 GB/file (100000000000 bytes) |
| Retention | not stated |
| Interface | cli uploader web app at upload.imagery.hotosm.org; STAC API at api.imagery.hotosm.org/stac; eoAPI (raster/vector/stac) behind it |
| Tooling | stactools-hotosm; STAC client; no CLI uploader yet |
| Composes with | Output is a COG + STAC item, i.e. cloud-native GeoTIFF — directly readable with GDAL/rio-tiler and range-friendly. But the payload must be an orthomosaic with georeferencing. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 5
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-21 | imagery.hotosm.org/contribute | 'If you cannot host imagery yourself, upload it'; the catalog-registration path stores metadata only |
| 2026-10-21 | github.com/hotosm/openaerialmap/discussions/258 | 'Handle files up to 100GB with resume capability, using S3 multipart upload with presigned URLs'; new API api.imagery.hotosm.org |
| 2026-10-21 | api.openaerialmap.org/meta?limit=1 | 200, {"meta":{..."found":21460},"results":[{..."uuid":"https://oin-hotosm-temp.s3.amazonaws.com/...tif"}]} |
| 2026-10-21 | api.imagery.hotosm.org/stac/collections | live STAC collections (cop-dem-glo-30, ...) |
| 2026-10-21 | source not published | api.openaerialmap.org/{upload,uploads,api/upload,upload/} — 404 on all four (no documented REST upload endpoint reached) |
Unknown values 3
- per object cap notes: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
- retention notes: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
- retention stated: the field may be stated in a source that was not read