{"id":686,"date":"2026-04-07T21:08:34","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T21:08:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/?p=686"},"modified":"2026-04-07T21:15:53","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T21:15:53","slug":"download-server-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/2026\/04\/07\/download-server-update\/","title":{"rendered":"Download Server Update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve recently added <strong>GeoPackage (gpkg) files<\/strong> to the download server, in addition to the shape files we&#8217;re already offering. This seems to be a popular addition; over half of the previous shape file download traffic has already migrated to the newer GeoPackage format &#8211; combining all layers in a single file, GeoPackage is more convenient than the old shape format.<\/p>\n<p>But there&#8217;s more: We have updated the layer structure in the shape and GeoPackage files to include more data. You can review the details in our <a href=\"https:\/\/download.geofabrik.de\/osm-data-in-gis-formats-free.pdf\">format specification PDF;<\/a> the most important news is that the free data sets now contain an <strong>administrative area layer<\/strong> which was previously only available in the paid data sets*. <\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/admin-300x244.png\" alt=\"administrastive areas\" width=\"300\" height=\"244\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-687\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/admin-300x244.png 300w, https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/admin.png 537w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve also added a protected areas layer and many POIs, but taken great care not to upset things too much so that people shouldn&#8217;t have to re-tool their processing chains built for previous versions of our shape files. Enjoy!<\/p>\n<p><small>(*) Note that OSM doesn&#8217;t have a hierarchy of admin levels (i.e. city X is in county Y is in state Z) by default, and neither are boundaries clipped along the coastline. Administrative area shape files that have these extra features are available from us commercially.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve recently added GeoPackage (gpkg) files to the download server, in addition to the shape files we&#8217;re already offering. This seems to be a popular addition; over half of the previous shape file download traffic has already migrated to the newer GeoPackage format &#8211; combining all layers in a single file, GeoPackage is more convenient [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=686"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":692,"href":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions\/692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.geofabrik.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}