2012-06-29

Open Source Aerial Imagery

If you've seen my Book of War game-play posts (like here), then you'll see that I use flat paper illustrations for the various terrain pieces (like Marshes, Ponds, Streams, etc.). I'd like to make these publicly available, but the imagery I used is copyrighted and not re-distributable. I've looked for open source aerial imagery under a license that can be modified and re-distributed (at a fairly high resolution, like ~1m), but thus far I've failed.

At this point I suspect that it simply doesn't exist. Am I wrong? If someone could link to specific imagery and quote a license that says it's re-distributable, then that would be spectacular.


3 comments:

  1. Look:
    http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelines.html

    I don't know if there are pictures with big enough resolution on the site to be of use, but maybe there are somewhere hidden ones.
    This is the place to look, I think:
    http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/

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  2. In addition to NASA's satellite photos, the USGS has public domain high altitude photography. These ones are at 1m ground resolution.

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  3. ^ Hey guys, just had a chance to follow up on these, thanks for the suggestions.

    The NASA site doesn't seem to have any way to search specific locations (they're most one-off promotional stuff), and they're way too far back in resolution.

    The USGS site is closer to the mark, but unfortunately even their lowest-level DOQ (1m ground resolution) is also about 8 times too big for what I need. (For example, Google maps gets that close in, but of course it's commercially licensed.) Also USGS has the most amazingly complicated search/download system I've ever seen, that's a crazy epic tale in itself, but kind of a side point.

    So looks like I'm stumped, but I do appreciate the ideas!

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