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📍 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.

📋 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.

🎬 Full Demo

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

⚙️ Input

Example: search London worldwide.

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

Example: every postal code in Germany.

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

📊 Output

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

🧾 Schema

📦 Sample records

✨ Why choose this Actor

📈 How it compares to alternatives

🚀 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.

💼 Business use cases

🔌 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.

🌟 Beyond business use cases

Data like this powers more than commercial workflows.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

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

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

❓ 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.

🔌 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

🔗 Recommended Actors

• 🌍 REST Countries - Country reference data with capital, currency, flag
• 🌍 Public Holidays Worldwide - Public holidays for 100+ countries
• 🌍 Open-Meteo Weather - Global weather forecasts
• 🌐 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.

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

⚠️ 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.