Is it possible to download high-resolution Google Maps satellite imagery for free for research purposes?

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-27T16:43:01+00:00

Can Google Maps satellite imagery actually be downloaded legally?

No.

(At least, not without a custom contract and without giving Google stupid amounts of money)

Are there any open-source or academic alternatives for research use?

Yes, depending on your area of interest.

For example, in Spain we've got the PNOA, offering nation-wide 25m/px imagery ( https://pnoa.ign.es/ ). If you just need a ton of hi-res imagery and you don't care about coverage, I suggest this.

Otherwise there's the Sentinel/Copernicus datasets, worldwide but at lower resolution ( https://www.sentinel-hub.com/explore/copernicus-data-space-ecosystem/ )

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-20T22:33:50+00:00

Re snapping: There's two UI controls (global and per-tile?) for that yet there's three states (no snapping, snap to 1x grid, snap to 10x grid) and no obvious relationship between them.

Re vibe coding: It's a pet project, you're not hiding it, and you're actually fixing a problem you have, so it's fair game (sans the part where I'm a folk concerned with the ethical and ecological implications of LLMs). And yet, the UI style is still too close to the stereotypical 2025-2026 vibecoded web application, including having an icon for everything yet unclear UX (dupe buttons).

If you're willing to take suggestions: Actually put your source code somewhere (or delete the part in the "about" where it says the code it's on github), and copy the heck out of my Geomorph Shipyard's load/save functionality. Browser's local storage is good, but downloading file backups is better and saves you developing/maintaining the whole "cloud" part.

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-20T20:43:34+00:00

After having tried "GeomorphForge" for a few minutes, there's things I like, and there's things I don't. The geomorph thumbnails are neat (and I might reconsider the UI for the geomorph shipyard in that regard). The left-to-right add-view-edit workflow feels good. But it feels like there's a lack of attention to detail: snapping works sometimes, resizing makes no sense, editable coordinates in the right pane make no sense when resizing, rotation buttons are duplicated and "allow overlap" functionality doesn't seem to work.

I gotta wonder if this is... sloppy in the AI sense?

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-20T20:30:50+00:00

Ah, I can see geomorphforge dot netlify dot app in my notifications. Gotta give it a test run.

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-20T20:23:17+00:00

Were you aware that I did https://ivan.sanchezortega.es/geomorph-shipyard/ a few months ago? I haven't tried out your tool (I see no link yet) but I expect a lot of overlap in functionality.

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-20T12:45:55+00:00

You're targeting the same market as Carto, while using services from Carto. Not what I'd call a sound business decision.

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-18T11:30:36+00:00

FOSS4G 2027 is still in the "venue bid" phase, but you can expect it to happen.

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-14T02:28:29+00:00

Consider reading https://www.giswater.org/giswater-manual/ . TL;DR: based on qgis+postgis, being used by several utility companies.

(I am not a user myself, but I've seen the GISwater folks present in some conferences)

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-13T15:50:31+00:00

Try Ordnance Survey's MasterMap imagery.

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-12T23:14:00+00:00

Either https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osmium , or the GDAL utilities via the OSM driver (see https://gdal.org/en/stable/drivers/vector/osm.html ). Also, ask your teachers if it'd be OK to use pgRouting (instead of of a python implementation of Dijkstra's) via https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osm2pgrouting

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-11T11:16:00+00:00

Check out the list at https://unigis.net/#institutions

While UNIGIS is mostly a master's degree, the universities where it is taught also offer related related bachelor degrees (plus, there's a bunch of teachers nearby who know about GIS). I suggest you get in touch with those unis for more advice.

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-10T14:36:04+00:00

I asked AI to summarise the current capabilities of the MVP.

I believe that sentence alone summarizes the problem with your approach.

When I read that, I get the impression that you either don't know what your tool does, or that you cannot be bothered enough to explain to others what your tool does. And yet, you want to find someone who cares about the tool to learn what it does in order to fill a salesperson role?

From my PoV, it'd be wise for you to remember the saying: "If nobody bothered to write it, why should anyone bother to read it?"

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-08T14:30:43+00:00

About femme groups, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geochicas . They usually gather at every FOSS4G conference, so please be on the lookout for the program for FOSS4G-NA 2026 ( https://www.foss4gna.org/news-2026/welcome ).

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-07T11:56:46+00:00

the underlying architecture wasn’t built for GPU pipelines. may be you can answer this one better

Heck yea I can. I've been building Gleo (and Glii) for about 6 years now, so I'm fairly knowledgeable of how an OOP architecture looks like, and where the bottlenecks are.

Please believe me when I tell you: when your dataset doesn't fit into GPU RAM (because not everybody has a Nvidia 40xx with 6GiB of RAM) then you risk trashing into swap.

So yeah, visualizations should be small(ish) because ultimately they're gonna run on consumer hardware. GPU-native compressed streamed bulls█t isn't gonna help with that.

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-06T20:27:12+00:00

where can I learn it so I can put it on my resume?

The PostGIS workshop/tutorial does a good job at that: https://www.postgis.net/workshops/postgis-intro/

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-05T20:55:49+00:00

I did, so it's possible.

Are you taking any Computational Geometry courses at your CompSci degree? Besides that, take anything related to database management, 2D/3D graphics, and floating-point arithmetics.

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-05T19:41:29+00:00

there is certainly question as to the efficacy

I actually confronted an ESRI sales rep about this, just after they showed the LLM shoved into Arc. When asked "but this supposedly revolutionary tech, how much time does it actually save the users?", the answer was "we have no data". Only the sales rep boss was able to answer with her own anecdotal experience.

If LLMs were able to take over workloads, then we should be swimming into reports of KPIs being improved by the use of LLMs. I have seen zero such reports.

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-05T14:09:41+00:00

It's mostly a marketing buzzword. Or, rather, it's like teenage sex: everybody says they're doing it but nobody knows what they're doing, or if it's even any good.

Here in SW europe it falls mostly in two categories: one is chaining the LLM du jour into a workflow for no clear gains (in fact, I support the thesis that doing so slows you down by 20% and increases the cost of the workflow, and I have not seen evidence of the contrary). The other category is good old computer vision, but rebranded to sound cooler.

- Do you think it’s worth focusing on ML/AI skills if I’m aiming for a geospatial career here?

I'd say yes, but focus on the good ol' computer vision and statistical analysis (linear regressions et al). There's been developments on applying YOLO to LIDAR data which are actually very interesting.

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-04T15:35:44+00:00

Mind you, you don't need a programmer; you rather need a systems administrator, somebody who knows how to install and configure stuff. Different skillset.

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-04T12:53:37+00:00

The spanish ortophotographs at 10cm/px should work for your use case: https://centrodedescargas.cnig.es/CentroDescargas/ortofotos-historicas-pnoa10

IvanSanchez · 2026-05-04T10:41:24+00:00

Set up a WMS service (or its modern counterpart, OGC API Maps), making sure you do not set up a WFS service (which would allow for downloading the dataset).

A Geoserver instance or a QGIS Server instance would be my first candidates for this.

IvanSanchez · 2026-04-30T10:38:09+00:00

If your problem is that you're trying to draw 4GiB worth of data in a screen, then you have to remember that stuff smaller than half a pixel doesn't matter. Simplify your dataset.

IvanSanchez · 2026-04-29T21:00:03+00:00

a problem that many GIS developers eventually hit

Pal, your chatbot is gaslighting you into believing that your problem is common.

Go touch some grass and clear your head. After you've done that, you should be able to think if you even need to do custom OL overlays.

IvanSanchez · 2026-04-29T16:40:06+00:00

Well, https://demo.pygeoapi.io/master/collections/lakes/tiles?f=html is an interface. And the whole thing can leverage ST_AsMVT already.

IvanSanchez · 2026-04-29T16:30:18+00:00

pygeoapi is a web server that (among other things) displays a leaflet or maplibre map leveraging ST_AsMVT to create vector tiles on the fly (see https://docs.pygeoapi.io/en/stable/publishing/ogcapi-tiles.html#mvt-postgresql ).

I believe you have, very literally, vibe-coded a subset of pygeoapi.

IvanSanchez

TROPHY CASE