Inaccurate Reverse Geocoding Results in Mountainous Areas

[ybert]

As I understand it, Nominatim searches for named roads around a point in the reverse geocoding service.
However, in mountainous and outdoor contexts, it often provides inaccurate results, as many paths and tracks are unnamed.

For example, in this case: https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/reverse.html?lat=45.73091&lon=6.02579&zoom=18
The point I am looking for is clearly located in "Saint-Offenge-Dessous."
While the point found by Nominatim is also in "Saint-Offenge-Dessous" it returns "Arith" instead.

[lonvia]

Nominatim returns the address of the closest OSM object that it has indexed. It hasn't indexed unnamed roads, so cannot return them. Because of that, you should make sure you reverse geocode for the kind of object you are interested in instead of just retrieving the closest object and using its address. If you are interested in the city of a location, you should adapt the zoom parameter to something like 12 or 13. There will still appear some seemingly unintuitive results sometimes, see discussion in #3538 but you will usually get something quite usable on those levels.

If you run your own server, you can also change the style to import unnamed roads as well. Then reverse geocoding should give you a reasonable result also in sparsely populated areas as long as there are some paths around.