Terraserver Photography

Saturday, 12 June 2004

I often times like going to TerraServer and looking at all the pictures from above.

What I don’t like is how the largest sized picture you can download is so small. What Terraserver does is it puts small tiles of images together to make a larger whole. The largest you can get is made up of twelve tiles. Four across and three down, resulting in an image 800×600.

I decided to see if I could do something about it. I ended up creating a php script that downloads as many tiles as I want and puts them back together as a whole.

I put in the top left tile that I want, while noting the bottom right tile of the final image I want. Then I subtract the x and y coordinates that Terraserver uses… giving me the width and height in tiles.

Plug in the info, and the script goes to work. It grabs all of the tiles in the first row, and puts them together using ImageMagick’s convert program. After all of the horizontal rows are formed… I make it put all of the rows together to form the final.

I made a picture the other day of Mason, MI… the size… 6000×4200.