GeoNames Global Places & Cities Database Exporter

Turn the official GeoNames bulk dumps into filtered, structured Apify datasets. Export cities, towns, administrative areas, airports, mountains, lakes and millions of other geographic features with coordinates, population, timezone and hierarchy codes—without a GeoNames username or API key.

Built for

• GIS and location-intelligence products
• Logistics, routing and service-area datasets
• Travel, hospitality and local marketplace apps
• Offline geocoding and autocomplete indexes
• Localization, analytics and AI/RAG training corpora

GeoNames updates its dump directory daily. The Actor streams both global and per-country ZIPs and can store up to 500,000 matching places per run.

Input

Field	Description	Default
dataset	cities500, cities1000, cities5000, cities15000, allCountries, or countryFiles	cities500
countryCodes	ISO alpha-2 filters; files to download in countryFiles mode	all / US
query	Search primary, ASCII and alternate names	empty
featureClasses	GeoNames classes such as P, A, S	all
featureCodes	Exact codes such as PPLC, PPLA, AIRP	all
minPopulation	Minimum population	0
maxResults	Maximum places, 1–500,000	1000

Example — populated places in Turkey with 10,000+ population:

{
  "dataset": "countryFiles",
  "countryCodes": ["TR"],
  "featureClasses": ["P"],
  "minPopulation": 10000,
  "maxResults": 100000
}

Example — worldwide capital cities:

{
  "dataset": "allCountries",
  "featureCodes": ["PPLC"],
  "maxResults": 10000
}

Output

Every item follows the documented 19-column GeoNames format and adds source, license and place links. Fields include geonameId, names, WGS84 latitude/longitude, feature class/code, country/admin codes, population, elevation, DEM, timezone and modification date.

{
  "geonameId": "745044",
  "name": "Istanbul",
  "asciiName": "Istanbul",
  "latitude": 41.01384,
  "longitude": 28.94966,
  "featureClass": "P",
  "featureCode": "PPLA",
  "countryCode": "TR",
  "population": 14804116,
  "timezone": "Europe/Istanbul"
}

API usage

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/YOUR_USERNAME~geonames-global-places-scraper/runs?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"dataset":"countryFiles","countryCodes":["DE"],"featureClasses":["P"],"maxResults":50000}'

License and source

Data comes from the GeoNames download server and is licensed under CC BY 4.0. GeoNames attribution must be retained. Coordinates are WGS84; coverage, names and population figures can vary by country and source contributor.

Changelog

• 2026-08-01 — v1.0.0: Initial release. Added five global city/all-feature datasets and country files, name/geography/feature/population filters, daily source links, CC BY attribution, 500,000-item scale and live default/filtered validation.