Copying big images from Google Earth

[Freefall]

Until now if I wanted to use a large image from Google Earth I zoomed in and stitched together lots of individual images to make a background map. I should have known there is a much easier way - Super-Googer is very easy to use. Input top left coordinates of the area (lat/long) which you can easily derive in lots of ways. I use maps.google.co.uk and if you right click and use "what's here?" the coordinates in the correct format are displayed in the search bar. Go to Super-Googer http://pallit.lhi.is/bigice/bigpic.html and you can choose number of tiles vertically or horizontally. I understand each tile is 256x256 pixels. A new window should appear with the area you want. Getting it into your mapping package can be done in various ways and depending on what browser you use - I installed Awesome Screenshot in Google Chrome which gives options of capturing the visible page, a selected area or what is really good the entire image (even what is not visible). The image can be saved (as a png) or copied to the clipboard and pasted elsewhere. I use something called Irfanview that allows you to save in any number of image formats such as jpg or tif. This all sounds very boring and techie but it is going to save me an enormous amount of time in the future.

[andypat]

Sounds good - could have done with that about 6 months ago! Installing awesome as I speak.

[Wayward-O]

Looks good. Easier to edit the command line than update the input page for changes, though. I prefer streetmap to find the starting coords.

I've tried using Awesome Screenshot to capture the resultant image but, unfortunately I've bitten off more than it can chew! Any one know what the limits of Awesome Screenshot are? It can't handle an area of 48x61 tiles .

[andypat]

Keeps crashing on me

[Freefall]

Which is crashing? Super-Googer or Awesome? For the former I was finding a maximum scale of 18 and trying about 10x10. Haven't done any more yet. These can be tiled using something like Microsoft ICE (an amazing image stitching package). Instead of Awesome there are other things on other browsers such as Firefox. Good luck but if anyone else has ideas let us know.

[Wayward-O]

Tried a 10x10 tile area, but Awesome Screenshot still crashes .

[RobL]

This is great.

In Chrome, you can just right click and 'Save image as...' to save as a jpeg.

In IE it's right click and 'Save picture as...'

Thanks again

Rob.

[Wayward-O]

Not quite. Right click and 'Save picture as..." saves a 256 x 256 tile only, not the full image - at least on Windows Vista.

[Freefall]

I have used Awesome and the option Capture Entire Page. This chugs away then when finished (including adding annotation if you want) click Done. I then used Copy to Clipboard and pasted into Irfanview (or whatever option you want). You can save in whatever format you want. Result as below with breaching any copyright:

nopesport.jpg (28.08 KiB) Viewed 3330 times

Obviously I have just saved at low resolution here.

Another option a user mentioned is:
I print it to a pdf printer (there are plenty of them free in the web) setting the page size to A0. It may contain many pages. I open the pdf pages with photoshop and create a new file tile by tile, however the tiles are A0 size this time. You will need processing time for this and the file will be really big.

Remember Google terms http://maps.google.com/help/terms_maps.html

[MJG]

I believe Google puts a limit of 1000 tiles in 24 hour period (presumably from one IP address). This could be one reason for apparent failures. I have found it easier to find the x,y values for the top left tile at the resolution (z value) I want using Image Report in IE Developer Tools and then use a script to download the tiles. ICE refuses to stitch them together (no overlap) so I then use IrfanView to create a series of vertical panoramas and then merge these as a horizontal panorama. Zoom level of 18 seems a good compromise between number of tiles and detail, not sure if 19 adds any more detail and 20 certainly doesn't.