OSMnx: Specify place in "gdf_from_place" better

Question

I am using OSMnx in Python to get the geometries of states (e.g. for Austria). However, OSMnx sometimes chooses the wrong OSM-object as place. Can I specify the OSM-object using its ID?

Example:

I get the names of the states in Austria using OverpassAPI:

(area["ISO3166-1"="{country}"];rel(area)[admin_level="{adminLevel}"];);
out center meta;

This give me the list of states:

@id @lat    @lon    name
35183   47.2199394  14.8675619  Steiermark
52343   47.1971981  11.5319171  Tirol
52345   46.7517868  13.8605291  Kärnten
74942   47.2184818  9.8839555   Vorarlberg
76909   47.4746574  16.5785134  Burgenland
77189   48.2213684  15.7607387  Niederösterreich
86539   47.4926636  13.0361103  Salzburg
102303  48.1168383  13.8707061  Oberösterreich
109166  48.2202874  16.3796721  Wien

But when I use OSMnx to get the geometry of "Salzburg", I get a point instead a polygon.

>>> outline = osmnx.gdf_from_place("Salzburg")

geometry    place_name
POINT (13.0464806 7.7981346)    Salzburg, 5020, Austria

Since "Salzburg" is a city as well as a state I would like put the OSM ID into the query to make it unambiguous. Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

OSMnx does not take an OSM ID, but you can specify if you want the city or the state (or even which_result):

import osmnx as ox
outline_city = ox.gdf_from_place({'city':'Salzburg'})
outline_state = ox.gdf_from_place({'state':'Salzburg'})

EDIT: note that as of OSMnx v0.15.0, the gdf_from_place and gdf_from_places functions have been deprecated and replaced by the geocode_to_gdf function. See the docs for details.