Better default background imagery selection

[sjakobi]

Description

When opening iD on the border between Thuringia and Saxony in Germany, I'm frequently presented with a screen that is mostly blank.

For example: https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit#map=13/50.63623/12.02471

For some reason iD prefers the "Saxony latest aerial imagery" which only covers a very little area beyond the border. Instead iD should have selected the "Thüringen DOP20" imagery which is more recent, and also covers a larger area of Saxony too.

IMHO iD should check whichever "starred" imagery covers the largest area of the selected area and select that one.

Screenshots

[tyrasd]

Sound like a good idea. 👍

[sjakobi]

Thanks for the quick (and positive!) feedback! :)

Here's another example, this time from the border of Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit?editor=id#map=18/51.225680/12.199393

vs

[tordans]

I recommend to check the borders of the given layers in the ELI project to see if an improvement there will help. https://osmlab.github.io/editor-layer-index/ is a good help for that.

[k-yle]

As Tobias mentioned, this should be optimised in ELI first. Currently the boundary for this imagery includes a lot of areas where there is no data:

[tyrasd]

True, the ELI outlines need also to be improved to properly address this. Ideally, it would be best to draw the simplified outlines such that they never include areas with no data.

However, the layer selection algorithm can also be improved still, e.g. for cases where there are two "best" layers and one is fully covering the area while the another one just covers it partially.