I found downloading OSM data using the plugin and going through the import and export motions very tedious. That's why I wrote up a different solution: http://anitagraser.com/2014/05/31/a-guide-to-googlemaps-like-maps-with-osm-in-qgis/
Summary:
Raw OSM files can be quite huge. That’s why it’s definitely preferable to download the compressed binary .pbf format instead of the XML .osm format.
As a download source, I’d recommend Geofabrik.
For the first preprocessing step: extracting the area of interest, we can use Osmosis:
C:\Users\anita_000\Geodata\OSM_Noirmoutier>..\bin\osmosis.bat --read-pbf pays-de-la-loire-latest.osm.pbf --bounding-box left=-2.59 bottom=46.58 right=-1.44 top=47.07 --write-xml noirmoutier.osm
While QGIS can also load .osm files, I found that performance and access to attributes is much improved if the .osm file is converted to spatialite.
C:\Users\anita_000\Geodata\OSM_Noirmoutier>ogr2ogr -f "SQLite" -dsco SPATIALITE=YES noirmoutier.db noirmoutier.osm
In QGIS, we can load the points, lines, and multipolygons using Add SpatiaLite Layer.
When we load the spatialite tables, there are some issues:
- There is no land polygon. Instead, there are “coastline” line features.
- Most river polygons are missing. Instead there are “riverbank” line features.
Creating the missing river polygons is not a big deal:
- select all the lines where waterway=riverbank.
- use the Polygonize tool from the processing toolbox to automatically create polygons from the areas enclosed by the selected riverbank lines. (Note that Processing by default operates only on the selected features but this setting can be changed in the Processing settings.)
Creating the land polygon (or sea polygon if you prefer that for some reason) is a little more involved since most of the time the coastline will not be closed for the simple reason that we are often cutting a piece of land out of the main continent. Therefore, before we can use the Polygonize tools, we have to close the area. To do that, I suggest to first select the coastline using "other_tags" LIKE '%"natural"=>"coastline"%' and create a new layer from this selection (save selection as …) and edit it (don’t forget to enable snapping!) to add lines to close the area. Then polygonize.