Is there a way to retrieve all cities in the world from OpenStreetMap?

Question

I have tried to retrieve them from the api with the following:

wget -O allcities.xml "http://www.overpass-api.de/api/xapi_meta?node[admin_level=8]"

however it does not seem to return all of them. From the doc Admin Level 8 should be cities, towns and villages but it seems to only contain major cities. I get a list of about 12000 nodes.

I am actually looking into getting all inhabited places on earth with at least 1000 population.

I am also downloading the whole planet in PBF format, in case using the API is not possible. How would I be able to achieve the same using such file?

Answer 1

I ended up using osmosis with the following call.

./osmosis --read-pbf planet-latest.osm.pbf --tf accept-nodes place=city,town,village --tf reject-relations --tf reject-ways --lp --write-pgsql database=postgis_test user=*** password=***

This seems to contain all cities that I was looking for. Cannot still say much on the data itself. After a couple of test it seems to contain a good amount of places even small villages.

In order to do that I had to however download the full OSM data of about 31 GB.

Answer 2

I haven't used the service, but gisgraphy.com - lists 4.3 million cities available via extract from OSM.