…then you might like this. For those of you who don’t have Google Earth Pro, I found an application that will automatically download and stitch together Google map tiles (as well as Microsoft maps). This means you can create a high resolution image of your map area, limited only by the maximum zoom level of Google Maps.
Here’s what you need:
gMapMaker, available here. (latest version is 0.7.3.2 as of this writing)
After you install and run gMapMaker, you will want to set the options like so:
I set the Max Parallel downloads to 1 and the Wait between requests to 6000 ms so as not to piss off the Google Maps Server. Meaning that downloading too many tiles at once will result in the server temporarily banning your IP. Sometimes even these settings will trigger a ban, if you download enough files, so you may want to be even more conservative. You’ll know if you get banned if the bottom parts of your image end up as black squares. It took me about 20 minutes to download about 300 256×256 tiles, which is better than waiting 12 hours or so for your IP to get unbanned. Fortunately, thanks to gMapMaker’s cache, you don’t have to re-download tiles that have already been downloaded when you try again.
The next setting is Map Area. Here you define the bounding box of your image with lat/long coordinates. gMapMaker has a built-in interface that allows you to select which area of the Earth you want to grab map tiles from, but if you want something a little more accurate, use the interface at the bottom of this page. Be sure to set the blue marker to the upper-left corner of your selection, so as to match the Map Area inputs in gMapMaker, then copy the lat/longs underneath the map to gMapMaker.
You can set the zoom level by going straight to Google Maps, zooming into the area you want (at the appropriate zoom level, it is not necessary to view the entire area), and hovering your mouse pointer over the “link” link in the upper-right corner. The URL in your status bar (if you use Firefox, anyway) should have something like “&z=14″ at the end. That number (14 in this example) is the zoom level you want to put into gMapMaker. If you are using some other browser that doesn’t show you the URL, just click on the “link” link and note the zoom level at the end of the URL that pops up (select the URL and hit the “end” button your keyboard”). Take note of the image size and memory needed at the bottom left of gMapMaker. If the image is too big for your application, you might want to lower the zoom level or shrink the area.
Be sure to set the map type to “Google Satellite”, unless you want another type.
You can set the image format to whatever works for you. Make sure to set the Operating mode to “OziExplorer mode, download and build merged image”.
Click Go, select a location to save the stitched-together image, and sit back and wait. This dialog will show you gMapMaker’s progress:
Have fun.
