I want to buy a particular aerial image that Google Maps is using. From their Help system I learn one must buy the imagery from their provider directly, but no word on how to find out who that is. There are copyrights listed at the bottom of the image, about ten of them at lower resolution and one at higher resolution, but they don’t lead to the provider of this image. The higher resolution copyright in particular leads to the source of map data, one of those companies that sells to GPS makers for auto maps.
It looks to me like this must be a photo from an airplane. At the highest resolution I can easily see people, can see several pixels between the rails of a railroad, and so forth - and this is with Google’s blurring and watermarks imposed. I bet the resolution is around 100 mm.
Does anyone know how to find who the provider is?
Their Help Forum: This has been an amazing frustration. To get an account you must type in the warped and blurred letters appearing in a little box, but I can’t read most of them. Clicking on a button is supposed to get you the audio for several numbers to use as an alternative, but it just makes a chime sort of sound. Almost an hour of this later, I got an account, which must use your email address as an account name. But when I try to post a question with this account, it blocks me saying the account name is unacceptably long. A fake email accoung won’t work because they send a confirming link to the address. I could try finding an email provider with shorter addresses and start over. Or, what would be probably easier, I could charter a plane myself. Best of all - does anybody here know the answer or have a Google account so they could post the question???
Here’s a link (I have not tried this before but hope it works):
This location is about 20 miles west of Philadelphia. There’s a railroad track coming in from the west and curving to the southeast through the woods, and a creek following about the same path, and a depression in the trees that 100 years ago was a working quarry. The area is between the little towns of Locksley and Glen Mills, in Pennsylvania.
I tried the link and got what I wanted. I’d be happy with the area (the dimensions) shown in the link, as well as the exact location.
BTW I have been shopping at Terraserver for years, but they don’t have this one. Google Maps used a 2005 image from the NJ Dept of Transportation for this area until recently - the bridge constructin project you can see underway in the UL corner of the image was probably in this stage 10 months ago.
According to this, the USDA Aerial Photography Field Office has 100% of Deleware County Pennsylvania in 1-meter natural color imagery from 2008. You might want to contact them
NinetyWt, thanks, but the link looks broken - can you paste the URL? I want digital images, and if I got paper first thing I’d do is scan it anyway.
Are you offering it as a general source of aerial photography, or do you think it’s Google’s source for this particular photo? There are dozens of aerial photography sources. One in particular that has been helpful here is PennPilot, from whom I got grayscale scans of a 1937 aerial with quite good detail. Oddly, the image shows very odd things at two locations - road intersections - that were critical to my interest. So I got the chance during a trip to Harrisburg to visit the state Archives, sign in, get the original photographs, and examine them in detail (white gloved of course). There were big blobs of red ink at the two locations. Apparently they were critical to somebody else’s interest, too.
Anyway, I seek the image Google uses in particular because it has higher resolution than any of the dozen or so I already have, and it is also newer. But I like browsing and collecting others and will try to download Delaware County as you did. Maybe I need to find out about LizardTech…
Sorry about that. It was the ftp page for pasda. The home page is here.
I’m saying it is a good source of aerial photography. I know that some Google imagery comes from USDA, but I don’t know if the one you wanted is one of these USDA images. I was hoping perhaps this easily obtainable image was suitable for your needs.
I noticed that in Google Earth it is possible to choose different ‘historic’ images; the data source is shown with each one. I wonder if the one you want is included in that set?
The link to get the viewer is here. I’m using the one called MrSID.
90, thanks, I downloaded half a gigabyte of images of my area. I don’t recognize them (but to be sure I have to compare them to my collection). A nice lead you gave me there - thanks!
We use the USDA imaging quite a bit in our work. Since the images are georeferenced, we can import them into something like TopoUSA and overlay them on the quadrangle map. Very useful when mapping floodplains.