Scraps google maps to create high detail maps over a large area
Ever since middle school, I've done a lot of exploring. By senior year of high school, I knew my town really well. In fact, as I had realized, I knew it better than google maps, or any map for that matter - I knew all these shortcuts and hidden paths that you wouldn't find on a conventional map. But, I knew that when I went off to college, I would invariably forget all this. Thus began my first map project - I took screenshots of Google maps and stitched them together manually. A painstaking process that wasn't particularly accurate, but it worked! I had to do the last few operations on my friend's gaming computer because mine couldn't handle the image sizes. I printed out my map on a large 4'x4' poster and annotated it with the culmination of everything I discovered in my years in Plainsboro. It remains my most prized possession.
mapmaker is a revisit to the same problem. I decided to build a program so I could create a map for where ever my life would lead me. When zoomed out, google maps provides a map over a large area with low detail. Zoomed in, the map is high detail over small area. To create a large map with high detail, the program iterates through thousands of zoomed in map pieces and stitches them together into one giant map.
Ithaca map (Low quality, had to be resized to upload to imgur)
Map of Ithaca printed out on 4'x8' banner
Full map file: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0lHgBCriwW_bWlSaXY2NmZxME0
This file is very large and may crash your computer (it crashes mine) Please be careful when you open it.
Pillow (pip install Pillow)
Selenium (pip install selenium)
Google Drive python API (optional) (https://developers.google.com/drive/v3/web/quickstart/python)
After downloading dependencies, run the main program map_maker.py
For large maps, it may be easier to run the main program in separate parts. For such cases, running
image_maker.py to generate map images and
image_stitch.py to stitch map images together is equivalent
image_cropper.py and fix_aspect_ratio.py can be used to edit image to dimensional specifications
Another feature for large maps is concurrent_image_maker.py which splits the map up and generates constituant images faster. After images are generated, image_sticher.py can be used to create the full map.