Release 1.3.0

This release further improves ordering of search results by putting more emphasis on result that match by their name. Postcodes with spaces will now also be found when the spaces are omitted (useful in countries like Netherlands and the UK).

The admin_level tag is now exported from Nominatim as another extra tag. As this tag can be particularly useful to distinguish between similarly named administrative boundaries, we will also add this to the database dumps on the export server.

Finally, streetnumber addresses in the Czech Republic and Slovakia should now be more flexible to find (thanks @barasoukup and @sinacek for helping sorting out the local usage patterns).

If you are using the Prometheus plugin, please note that the request timer metrics has been renamed from jetty_server_requests_seconds* to http_server_requests_seconds*.

Release 1.2.1

This is a bug-fix release which fixes an error "Request Entity Too Large" when importing dumps with the full geometry.

Release 1.2.0

This release makes the import pipeline fully multi-threading capabale making imports quite a bit faster. We've improved handling of words with apostrophes, so that possessive s will no longer match on its own. This will remove a few false positive matches from the result list. Thanks to @henrik242 for these two changes.

When presenting a result where no name translation in the user's selected language is available, Photon will now first try to fall back to the language from the -default-language parameter before using the name in the local language. Thanks to @tjvanderende for this change.

Finally, this release fixes a null pointer exception when trying to import the planet dump with country filters enabled.

Release 1.1.0

This release adds support for exporting postcodes from Nominatim's database. The postcodes will also be available in future dumps from the export server.

A new '-reverse-only' mode allows to create smaller database without a forward search functionality. This can be useful when you know that you only want to do address lookups on a coordinate. A reverse-only database saves about 60% of space and import time.

The free-form search now revisits the results to make sure that those float on top that match the original query best. In addition we've tweaked the location bias. Setting a low location_bias_score should now have a noticeable effect to favour results close to the focus point. Please note that the default values for the 'zoom' and 'location_bias_zoom' parameters have changed. If you have been setting them to custom values, you might have to tweak the parameters a bit to account for the new scoring algorithm.

Other notable changes in this release:

• countrycode filters are now available for the /api forward search endpoint (thanks @tsamaya)
• json dumps may now contain arbitrary json data in the extra field
• alternative names like alt_name now correctly appear in the json dumps
• various small performance optimisations (thanks @otbutz, @henrik242)

The export server will switch to 1.1.0 for the next export cycle. If you regularly consume dumps, please make sure you run at least Photon 1.0.1. Older versions are not compatible with the new dump.

Release 1.0.1

This is a bugfix release, which resolves an issue with backwards compatibility with database dumps created with future versions of Photon. It also updates some of the dependencies with reported security vulnerabilities (thanks @henrik242).

If you regularly download database dumps from the Photon export server, please update to this release. This will avoid compatibility issues with dumps created with future releases of the 1.x release series.

Release 1.0.0

This release sees us switching to the OpenSource backend for good. The ancient ElasticSearch code has been removed. The database schema has received a complete overhaul, many unnecessary parts removed and compression improved. As a result, the database now has half the size on disk than before. Queries have also become quite a bit faster. Most importantly, importing many languages into the database no longer slows down operations. The /structured endpoint is now always enabled.

The command-line interface has received a refresh and now uses a git-like command style. This should make it easier to keep track of the ever growing number of switches and levers. Check out the updated usage documentation. The old-style command-line interface still works, giving you time to update your scripts. It is slated for removal for version 2.

The JSON dump format is no longer considered experimental and a full specification is now available for those who want to create their own dump files to import.

Photon now has support for categories a new mechanism to implement custom filtering on your instance.

And finally, there is a new endpoint for Prometheus for better monitoring of the server (many thanks to @henrik242).

The minimum required Java version is now 21. This is a hard requirement from OpenSearch which we unfortunately cannot work around.

The 1.0.0 database schema is not backwards compatible. You need to recreate your database when updating from 0.7 or older. New extracts are already available on the download server and you can try the new 1.0.0 on the demo server.

Release 0.7.4

This release fixes a regression with the computation of the location bias in the OpenSearch version of Photon.

Release 0.7.3

This is a minor release which adds a startup check to Photon to ensure the database exists before using it. This check helps in particular to have a more meaningful error message when accidentally using an ElasticSearch-built database with the Photon OpenSearch version or vice versa.

This version also improves the shutdown by properly closing the database connection when the server is stopped. In very rare cases the hard shutdown could result in a corrupted database.

Release 0.7.2

This is a bug fix release fixing an inconsistency between JSON dumper and JSON reader, see #919. If you want to read self-created dumps or the experimental JSON dumps at https://download1.graphhopper.com/public/raw/ with any extra tags included, please update to this release.

Release 0.7.1

This is a bug fix release that fixes the following regressions:

• do not overwrite street of street addresses when an addr:place is present
• return only one result for reverse queries per default
• sort reverse results by distance per default

The release also updates dependencies to their latest version.