Photon

Photon is a geocoder built for OpenStreetMap data, turning place names and addresses into coordinates and coordinates back into addresses. It runs on OpenSearch as its search platform and answers queries over a self-hosted HTTP API.

Search handles search-as-you-type, multilingual results, location bias, typo tolerance, and filtering by OSM tag and value or by bounding box. Data is imported from OpenStreetMap using Nominatim, with continuous updates and support for import and export dumps in concatenated JSON format.

A private instance runs from prebuilt release binaries or from source, requiring Java 21+ and optionally an external OpenSearch 3.x database. GraphHopper provides weekly database dumps. The repo is owned by komoot, which also runs the public demo server.