The “Zoom in to Edit” is much too restrictive, making it very difficult to place items or draw long items that require a sense of the big picture.
When you draw a long stream for example you’ll often want to draw it zoomed out then successively zoom in to nudge its parts into place, other things are small but also require the big picture to get their positioning, since you’re at times working from old maps where definable features that calibrate with modern features may be distant from the item you are creating, and it is best done with a suitable zoom outward much larger than the current restriction.
Can I suggest the Zoom in to Edit is either removed or replaced with a prompt to check you are sure. It’s not necessarily important if other map items are showing whilst doing the drawing, though given the sparseness of items in places there may be only a few to display anyway, so it could be other items could show conditionally when in a far out zoom.
David
I know how you feel, as someone who has mapped many boundaries in the in-browser iD editor. We inherited this zoom limit from OSM’s version of iD. As I understand it, the main reason for it is performance: loading a large area from the server API can potentially consume a lot of server-side and client-side resources, and browser performance suffers when too many features are visible. OHM is sparser than OSM in most of the world, but where we have data, it can be much more dense than in OSM.
As you map waterways, you might find it easier to navigate them if you add the waterways to waterway relations. Then you can split up the ways and rely on the relation’s member list to navigate among them.
Inevitably, some editing tasks are more efficient in JOSM, which supports sparse downloads and won’t automatically download whatever is in the current viewport. I completely understand if you prefer iD, though; I personally try to do as much as possible in iD, despite obstacles such as this zoom limit.
We’re currently testing an alternative in-browser editor, Rapid, that’s based on iD but designed for better performance. It doesn’t have the same “Zoom in to Edit” interstitial, though there’s still a limit to how far you can zoom out while editing. Our version of Rapid doesn’t have any of OHM-specific customizations yet, but it could bridge the gap between iD and JOSM.
As a further thought outward of a certain zoom it could be adaptive by measuring the resources it uses and block further loading of them if it goes over a resource threshold, so they load only to a certain point, or simply load none, either with an appropriate message, except if there is any selected item it should always be loaded. People can choose to edit or not as they feel appropriate. Generally I think the satellite underlay should be sufficient without any other features loaded at all for all zoomed-out editing, so defaulting to none except the selected item and satellite should be sufficient I think out of the two concepts.
Thanks for the note of the other editing method - I’ve used the app before, I should reinstall it on this computer. Editing in the browser is very habitual in OSM because you notice things when viewing in the browser and just click Edit to improve it 
Thanks, I installed JOSM - I forgot how good the experience could be.
Perhaps when it says “Zoom in to Edit” it could also say “or use JOSM” - with the JOSM linked to the wiki for it?
d
This probably wouldn’t be specific to OHM, so you could file a feature request against the main iD project about improving that interstitial to be more helpful.