Yesterday when I was out mapping, I collected enough street numbers mapping one smaller estate, that I was able to interpolate the majority of the numbers in the estate myself.

It's got me thinking; previously when I've been collecting house numbers and address information, I run around with my phone camera and geotag photos of people's letterboxes, but this is a really mundane and repetitive process, especially importing everything into JOSM.

Instead, it might be more worth my while making a note of the house number on either side of the street, only at crucial areas, like corners. This is what I did yesterday, and I was able to use the Yahoo imagery to work out roughly where the rest of the house numbers were supposed to go. I got about sixty addresses out of nine waypoints (with two addresses per waypoint, one for each side of the road.)

Because I don't have to swap from GPS mode to geotag mode on my phone, I can collect addresses at the same time I'm doing a general survey of the area. This makes it a lot more practical to get more comprehensive data for urban areas.

You can check out the area I'm talking about (it's linked to this entry.) I'm always interested in feedback, so let me know if/how you collect this kind of data.