I have downloaded a pbf file, france_latest.osm.pbf, from geofabrik.de and want to use osmosis to filter it to get a .osm file with just the major roads. Here is my osmosis command string:
osmosis --read-pbf france-latest.osm.pbf --tf accept-ways highway=motorway,motorway_link,trunk,primary,secondary,trunk_link,primary_link,secondary_link --used-node --write-xml roads_m_1ry_2ry.osm
This produces a .osm file with the correct items, but it does not contain any field information to distinguish the different types of highway so I can display them in different colours in QGIS. I did the same operation a few years ago and the field information was contained in the filtered export so I am not sure why it hasn't worked this time. Is there something else I need to add to my osmosis command to get the field information?
The highway type data was in the .osm file generated by osmosis. It seems the information was getting lost when I tried to convert the .osm to a .db spatialite file to load into QGIS. But with QGIS 3 you no longer need to do this, as you can import .osm files directly into a project.