I’m wondering if anyone has an easy method for getting a high res aerial view of Oahu. Obviously I could go to google maps or some other such website, take screenshots one by one, and stitch them together, but this would take a very long time. I tried going to the USGS Earthserver page, but it’s very hard to navigate or figure out a way to easily download all data for a particular area. Is there some easy way to do this? There seem to be one or two software programs but they all are expensive and / or not for the Mac. I found one method of using google maps ‘share this’ link and changing the parameters, but Google apparently doesn’t like this and banned my IP from seeing any aerial images. Any ideas?
Try the program Gmapmaker, which you can find here: Mobile GMaps - Map Tile Caching tools
This program initially started out as a way to download the individual google maps tiles, but they later added MSN and Yahoo maps as well. Just recently, Google did something or other with their server, so it doesn’t work with google maps any more, but it still works with MSN (and I believe Yahoo) which are roughly comparable. You just enter the long/lat for the northeast and southwest corner, pick the imagery and zoom level, set it to “OZI explorer mode, download tiles and build merged image” and it should give you one big stitched-together image.
I have also never been able to get the orthoimagery from the earthserver site (I’ve gotten as far as downloading the huge .zip file, but after an hour of downloading it was corrupt). I have a colleague who ordered some directly from the USGS for a project he was working on and he was generally disappointed with the quality. They were about as good as the imagery in the google-earth based applet he used to order it with!