GIMP to the rescue of OpenEir

I'm off for a drive to the town of Tipperary this afternoon so there's an opportunity for me to go 'cross border' with OpenEir mapping.

But seeing as my previous satellite mosaic covered only county Limerick I needed to revisit the brilliant Mapproxy tool for aerial photographs covering the landmass further east. A few minutes later I had downloaded a grid of 6 images, each 800 pixels square and of 10km radius in coverage.

All that was left to do was to stitch them together, so it was a double click on my Paint Shop Pro desktop shortcut and..... nothing...... my 60 day trial period had expired. Damn! And double damn! While I'm sure its an excellent overall graphics package I wasn't about to cough up the euro equivalent of USD$99 when all I really need at the moment is a way of stitching satellite photos together. And besides the whole point of OpenEir is to keep it open, using as much free software and services as possible.

Searching with Google for freeware stitching applications though was a frustratingly futile exercise. But then I remembered about GIMP -

"the GNU Image Manipulation Program.  It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.  It works on many operating systems, in many languages."

And it works great! Here is my latest satellite background image and the calibration coordinates are -

Top Left
North: 52.754554249534
West: -8.7711762453472

Bottom Right:
South: 52.395226051398
East: 7.8854808840635

So, you can calibrate the map yourself on MyGPS or wait for me to upload the fully calibrated map myself, hopefully tonight.

UPDATE: I've just realised that Flickr doesn't go large enough to show the 2400 x 1600 image unaltered so that image will be no good for calibration. Sorry. I'll update the full images directly on this blog later.

UPDATE 2: I forgot to mention that Limerick city appears near the top left of the image at the mouth of the Shannon (obviously!) and Tipperary town can easily be seen towards the bottom right just above the dark patches where the Galtee mountains begin.

Comments

[Dave]

Flickr allows me upload Images as large as I want! Did it ask you to resize or something? Or was the filesize too large?

[James Corbett]

Hmmm, I'm not sure. I don't imagine the filesize was too large but it just went and resized the image anyway (without asking me!) :(

Some investigation required....

[Emmet]

I know that if you use the Flickr Uploadr [http://flickr.com/tools/] you get the option to automatically resize or leave images as they are.

Interetsing to see the project developing. Keep up the good work. Are you interested in spreading the project to involve other areas, start storing the data, etc?

[James Corbett]

Aha, I'm sure that's it! I was in a hurry at the time so just used the browser upload feature instead of the Uploadr which I used to upload the journey photos. I suppose the browser upload just automatically resizes if necessary. I'll use the Uploadr tool from now on.

Thanks for the interest and yes, I'd love to start storing this data in all manner of different ways - whatever makes it most accessible for people. As I've said all along I'm a newbie to this stuff and am sure there are better ways of doing it, but as long as I'm collecting the data in GPX format I'm sure it will be 'future proof'.

Please feel free to get involved and make suggestions Emmet :)