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http://jdmcox.com/

My dad is a 70 year old x86 assembler hack, and contributes regularly to the open software community (see http://jdmcox.com/). I write place-and-route algorithms for a living, founded one company, was the key technical lead at one other, and basically feel like a fairly smart SOB. When I come home to dad's house, he humors me when I talk about my programming exploits. I know he feels there is little chance I will ever be a very advanced programmer compared to him. He was a Delta pilot for his entire career, and only started playing with computers when he saw me playing with them in college. Go figure.

Hmm that's funny, the arial photography looks exactly the same as the 1m photos at http://terraserver.microsoft.com/, except with addressing by street addr instead of lat/long or UTM. With google earth (or maps.google.com) I get both capabilities, plus color arial/sat photography. Personally I'd rather just use USAPhotoMaps to download the terraserver topo/photo images and google earth for street maps/directions and arial/sat color photos.

Especially for GPS use.

Have you tried usaphotomaps from JDMCOX?

USAPhotoMaps downloads aerial photo and topo map data from Microsoft's free TerraServer Web site, saves it on your hard drive, and creates seamless maps from it. You can:
1. See the latitude/longitude
2. Add waypoints, routes, and text
3. Jump to any waypoint or latitude/longitude in the U.S.A.
4. Transfer waypoints, tracks, and routes to and from most GPS receivers
5. See your GPS location
6. Scroll and zoom

And it's free.

Not everyone uses this one all that often, but I do: USAPhotomaps, a free and fast way to access images from Terraserver.

USAPhotomaps

In related technology, there is a very cool piece of software out there (free download) called Usa Photo Maps - This allows you to use Microsoft's terraserver photo maps as a base for your GPS tracks and numerous other GPS functions. Very cool for overlaying your tracks after a day of hiking or skiing, or even just out driving. Downsides are that it's windows only, and terraserver data is very old.

If you have a GPS receiver and live in the United States, you should check out USAPhotoMaps. It lets you view your waypoints superimposed on areal photographs. The best part is that it's free. the bad part is that it only runs on Windoze.

I'd say try here http://jdmcox.com/ , but you're running linux. Maybe someone else will find this usefull. I have even though I don't have a GPS receiver.

If you want to use your gps trakpoints and display them over satellite maps, the best source for maps (in the US) is Microsoft Terraserver which hosts USGS maps. Extracting the maps is another thing. However, there are some really cool tools to do that:

1. USAPhotoMaps. [FREE]This is a very simple interface which can download topology maps (the usual atlas maps), as well as black-and-white satellite imagery (down to 1 m), and color aerial maps (down to 0.25m for select cities.). It can also plot your gps trackpoints on the aerial photos/maps provided the output is in the form of garmin .gpx files, or some other formats. (Thankfully it is very easy to write a tiny program to convert your lat-long to these ASCII formats).
Cons: cannot plot more than one trackpoint on the map.

2. Quakemap. [Free initially, $9.99 to register]All the above features, plus the ability to plot as many trackpoints as you want plus a much more advanced interface plus the ability to track your gps receiver in real time over a satellite map (provided your receiver gives its output as NMEA). For 10 bucks, you get the ability to store the image files offline so that you can take this on a trip and see your vehicle tracked on cool aerial photos.

There are other tools that can download terraserver maps, but none that has the ease of the above two. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

There is an equivalent tool that does the same on OSX, but I can't recall the name.

Is there any tool that can download aerial photos for free for the rest of the world?

I've found USAPhotoMaps http://jdmcox.com/ to be an excellent free (as in beer) solution for plotting and viewing all my GPS data. It will download B&W aerial phots, USGS topos, and high resolution color photos of available areas.

It won't do profile slicing, or 3d elevation, but all in all it's the best GPS mapping software I've found for free. It beats a lot of commercial solutions in my opinion.

I prefer USAPhotoMaps http://jdmcox.com/ but it is Windows only.

I don't know if you have tried using say, Mapquest's. If you have, you might have been in the mood to say "Mapquest is on crack". The directions are a good attempt, but aren't anywhere near effective.

The online direction and mapping tools are indeed lacking but the standalone packages are quite impressive. Garmin's Metroguide is really nice and coupled with a GPS makes travelling in an unfamiliar city much less stressful in my experience. But, I'm the nerdball you see driving down the road with GPS on the dash, a wi-fi antenna stuck to the top all hooked to my laptop honking and whistling in the backseat or in the lap of a passenger.

I have to admit though that the best route planning and mapping software I've used is Microsoft's Streets and Trips. You can update your route with the latest construction areas and request a certain type of road. My sister is going to the beach and I requested all freeways and limited-access highways to cut down on the number of turns and exits she would have to navigate. Streets and Trips gave me a route with one exit not counting the final destination. Not bad for a ~400 mile trip. I personally took a similar trip two weeks ago and opted for the shortest route instead of the simplest and it worked like a champ.

The net effect is that if you follow automated directions the trip time will mostly be far longer than if a person familiar with local conditions selects the route.

No argument there but unfortunately that's not always feasible.

Beside which, topography is modeled but the ground cover isn't.

For this reason you can't solely rely on topo maps. The TerraServer has aerial photos down to 1 meter resolution. That's not going to cut it for the military but for you and me that's plenty. Besides, the military uses aerial and satellite imagery that is much higher resolution than anything available to civilians. For better or worse that's the way it is.

Semi ontopic: for some cool Win32 software to let you play around with aerial photos and eat up some of Microsoft's bandwidth at the same time :) check out USAPhotoMaps, it's free as in beer. I picked up TopoFusion not too long ago and love it. It's not free but it's worth the $40 I put into it. It lets me pull down imagery from the TerraServer site and overlay it with topo maps. It also has a neat feature that syncs digital photos with waypoints you've set in your GPS and will spit out a web page with clickable icons at each waypoint that is quite nice. Oh, and it lets you download elevation information and generate 3D maps of an area. Neato! I haven't played with much GPS software outside the Win32 domain but I'll be researching that as soon as i re-partion my Thinkpad for a dual-boot.

Well, I can say with some surety that this system would never be permitted for use in the US military for these reasons, as well as a few others. Nothing will obviate good reconnaissance.

True, but good reconnaissance sometimes includes nothing more than a satellite image of an area. This info could be (maybe it is?) updated realtime on a notebook in the field via uplink. Admittedly I know very little about how our military operates outside of the world of Tom Clancy novels :) But this looks neat as hell for civilians at least.

I've always enjoyed using JDM Cox's 'USAPhotoMaps' for free: USAPhotomaps -- it downloads terraserver images, allows zooming, panning, path overlay, and spot marking, among other features. Good stuff.

Most of the USGS topo maps I've seen are older than Microsoft, some even older than Bill Gates. They aren't updated very often and are useless for finding roads and streets. I use USGS maps for hiking and they ARE useful for that.

Microsoft's terraserver is a PITA to use. Get "usaphotomaps" from jdmcox It's a great way to get photos and topos that you can zoom in and out of easily. The topos are still older than dirt, but the aerial photos are just a few years old.

There is a quirky mapping tool that will let you take GPS tracks and waypoints and plot them onto Terraserver aerial photos.

It's not open source and only for Windows, but it's free: USAPhotoMap

I wrote about it a couple monts ago in my blog. It may be better now...haven't had a chance to try it lately. My main complaint at the time was that the Terraserver maps were not publishable, legally speaking, but I later learned they are.

Any open source tools out there that do something similar? I'd love to build one myself if I had the time.

I visited that site and others a few years ago.

If you like playing around with satellite images from Microsoft's Terraserver, try USAPhotoMaps. This (Windows only) software will download multiple images from Terraserver and stitch them together seamlessly. You can also switch between photo images and USGS topo map images.

Spy on you your neighbors. Check out the 6 pixels representing the car you owned 5 years ago. Really cool.