Enormous Google Earth images

Friday, 19 September, 2008

If you haven’t come across Super Googer before then it is well worth a look. This is a simple hosted PHP script that uses Google’s tile encoding system for Google Earth imagery to download as many tiles as you want.

Do you want a 200x200 super image London? Easy to do. The one parameter you do need to know is the upper-left tile from which the image will start. There are some useful instructions here. Once you know the start tile, specify the size of the image and it will download in to a new window. Of course the problem is what you actually do with this once its downloaded as its only in your browser. You could print it or try to stitch all the tiles back together (and there are some shareware products that do this). However the easiest solution is to use the ScreenGrab! Firefox extension which, as the name suggests, does a browser screengrab. However it’s a bit cleverer than that and can output the entire browser page as an image. Great solution to extracting very large Google Earth images.