📍 GeoNames Places + Postal Codes Scraper

🚀 Pull populated places, admin divisions, and postal codes from GeoNames: lat/lng, hierarchy, population, timezone, alternate names.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-07 · 📊 22 fields per record · 12M+ places · admin1/2/3 hierarchy · stable codes · postal codes · alternate names in 100+ languages

The GeoNames Places + Postal Codes Scraper pulls reference geographic data from GeoNames, the most-cited open gazetteer worldwide. Output includes the geonameId, place name (in the requested language), country, full administrative hierarchy with stable codes, latitude/longitude, population, elevation, timezone, and feature classification.

GeoNames covers 12+ million populated places plus 4M+ alternate names, every official administrative division, and country postal codes. Three modes: search by name, list children of a country/admin division, or pull postal codes by country. Use cases include localized dropdowns, address autocomplete, geo-aware search, and OPAC integrations.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Travel platforms, e-commerce checkout, address autocomplete, geo-search, GIS engineers, journalists	Country/state/city dropdowns, postal-code validation, geo-aware search, fact-card population, alt-name disambiguation

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📋 What the GeoNames Places + Postal Codes Scraper does

Five filtering workflows in a single run:

• 🔍 Search by name. Match populated places by name with optional country and feature-class filter.
• 🗺️ Admin hierarchy. List every populated place under a country, with admin1/2/3 codes.
• 📮 Postal codes. Pull every postal code in a country with city + admin attribution.
• 🌐 Multilingual names. Place names in 20+ languages with lang parameter.
• 📊 Rich metadata. Population, elevation, timezone, feature class for every record.

💡 Why it matters: clean, server-side filtering and fresh data on every run.

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🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon: a 3-minute walkthrough showing how to go from sign-up to a downloaded dataset.

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⚙️ Input

Input	Type	Default	Behavior
maxItems	integer	10	Records to return. Free plan caps at 10, paid plan up to 1,000,000.
mode	string	"cities"	cities (global ≥1000 pop), country (full per-country dump), postalcodes (per country).
country	string	""	ISO-2 country code. Required for country and postalcodes modes.
query	string	""	Name substring filter (matches name + ASCII + alternate names).
featureClass	string	""	P=populated, A=admin, H=hydro, T=terrain, etc.
minPopulation	integer	0	Filter to places with at least this population.

Example: search London worldwide.

{
    "maxItems": 50,
    "mode": "cities",
    "query": "London"
}

Example: every postal code in Germany.

{
    "maxItems": 2000,
    "mode": "postalcodes",
    "country": "DE"
}

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📊 Output

Each record contains 22 fields. Download as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

🧾 Schema

Field	Type	Example
🆔 geonameId	number	2643743
📛 name	string	"London"
📛 toponymName	string	"London"
🆔 countryCode	string	"GB"
🌍 countryName	string	"United Kingdom"
🗺️ adminCode1	string	"ENG"
🗺️ adminName1	string	"England"
🌐 lat	number	51.5074
🌐 lng	number	-0.1277
👥 population	number	8961989
📐 elevation	number	null
🕒 timezoneId	string	"Europe/London"
🏷️ featureClass	string	"P"
🏷️ featureCode	string	"PPLC"
🔗 geonamesUrl	string	"https://www.geonames.org/2643743/"
📮 postalCode	string	null

📦 Sample records

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
📚	12M+ places. Most cited open gazetteer worldwide.
🌐	100+ languages. Place names + alternate names in many languages.
🗺️	Stable hierarchy. admin1/2/3 codes that join across data sources.
📮	Postal codes built in. Per-country postal-code lookup.
⚡	Fast. 100 records in under 30 seconds.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Filters	Setup
⭐ This Actor	$5 free credit	12M+ places	Live per run	mode, query, country, feature	⚡ 2 min
Manual geonames.org browse	Free	Manual	Live	Web filters	🕒 Manual
Mapbox / Google Geocoding	$$	Similar but paid	Live	Yes	🐢 API key
Raw GeoNames CSV dump	Free	All	Monthly	Bulk only	🐢 ETL pipeline

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🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Find the GeoNames Places + Postal Codes Scraper on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Pick filters and maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start.
5. 📥 Download. Grab results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💼 Business use cases

🛒 E-commerce + SaaS Country/state/city dropdown UIs Postal-code validation on checkout City autocomplete with population sort Tax-region routing	✈️ Travel + Logistics Place autocomplete for trip planners City pages for travel content Distance-from-airport queries Multi-language city names
🎓 Education + Research Geography quiz apps Reproducible place datasets Course materials Geo-data primers	🤖 NLP + ML Train geo-NER models Build geo-aware embeddings Power location-mention extraction Reverse-geocode datasets

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🔌 Automating GeoNames Places + Postal Codes Scraper

Control the scraper programmatically:

• 🟢 Node.js. Install the apify-client NPM package.
• 🐍 Python. Use the apify-client PyPI package.
• 📚 See the Apify API documentation for full details.

The Apify Schedules feature lets you trigger this Actor on any cron interval.

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

Data like this powers more than commercial workflows.

🎓 Research and academia Cross-language place studies Reproducible gazetteer snapshots Course exercises Cultural-geography research	🎨 Personal and creative Personal travel maps Hobby cartography Newsletter content Side projects with place data
🤝 Non-profit and civic NGO geographic context Open-data contributions Civic-tech projects Multilingual literacy resources	🧪 Experimentation Train geo-NER models Prototype location-aware agents Build map-overlay experiments Test geocoding pipelines

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🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Open a ready-to-send prompt in the AI of your choice:

• 💬 ChatGPT
• 🧠 Claude
• 🔍 Perplexity
• 🅒 Copilot

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🔑 Do I need a GeoNames account?

No. The Actor downloads GeoNames bulk dumps directly (no username, no API key). Bulk dumps are GeoNames' canonical distribution and refresh daily.

🧩 How does it work?

Pick a mode and supply the relevant filters. The Actor calls the GeoNames JSON API and emits one record per place, admin division, or postal code.

📊 How many fields per record?

Up to 22, including geonameId, name, country, admin hierarchy, lat/lng, population, elevation, timezone, feature class/code, and direct GeoNames URL.

🌐 Which languages are supported?

20+ via the language parameter, including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Arabic.

🏷️ What are feature classes?

GeoNames classifies places by type: P=populated places, A=admin divisions, H=hydrographic, T=terrain, S=spots/buildings, V=vegetation, R=roads, U=undersea, L=parks/areas.

🔁 Can I schedule runs?

Yes. Use Apify Schedules for periodic refreshes.

⚖️ Is this data free?

Yes. GeoNames publishes under Creative Commons Attribution that permits commercial reuse with attribution.

💳 Do I need a paid Apify plan?

No. The free plan covers preview runs.

🆘 What if a run fails?

Apify retries transient errors. Most failures stem from invalid usernames or rate limits — register your own free GeoNames account for reliable runs.

📮 How do postal codes work?

Each postal-code record includes the code, locality, country, admin1/2 codes/names, and lat/lng. Coverage varies by country.

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🔌 Integrate with any app

GeoNames Places + Postal Codes Scraper connects to any cloud service via Apify integrations:

• Make - Automate multi-step workflows
• Zapier - Connect with 5,000+ apps
• Slack - Get run notifications
• Airbyte - Pipe data into your warehouse
• GitHub - Trigger runs from commits
• Google Drive - Export datasets to Sheets

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🔗 Recommended Actors

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• 🌐 Wikidata Entity Search - 100M+ open knowledge-graph entities
• 🗺️ OpenStreetMap Nominatim - Geocode addresses worldwide via OSM

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

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🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form to request a new scraper, propose a custom data project, or report an issue.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by GeoNames or any contributing geographic-data provider. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available open data is collected.