High resolution, recent aerials for the Portland region
Madeline Steele
Hello Portland-area OSM mappers,
Every year, the Metro Regional Aerial Photo Consortium pays to get high quality imagery of our region collected from airplanes. TriMet (my employer) pays for part of the cost, and so we get access to the imagery service Metro creates and can pull it into JOSM for OSM editing. For while, I've been wishing that there was a way to share this valuable imagery with the local OSM community. My boss Bibiana and I worked with our partners at Metro, and they agreed to amend the Intergovernmental Agreement between Metro and TriMet to include the following sentence: "TriMet may provide OpenStreetMap mappers with access to Metro Aerial Imagery Consortium's Tile Map Service (TMS) for the purpose of tracing to derive and improve vectors in OpenStreetMap." Hooray!
If you are interested in accessing this imagery for OSM improvement, please email me at madeline.steele at gmail and request an access token and set up instructions. I’m not going to share them in this post because I want to be a bit careful with the tokens in order to ensure that they stay in the OSM community. If the service starts getting shared more broadly and is used for commercial purposes, it would violate our agreement with Metro and could throttle their servers. They might need to shut down OSM user access under those circumstances. Also, I’d like to keep track of how many people are using it.
Metro has a slick Tile Mapping Service (TMS) set up for the summer 2016 flight, and we also have preliminary imagery from June 2017 available. This more recent imagery draws much, much slower though, so I’d only use it if you’re looking at an area with recent construction and have some patience. A 2017 TMS should be released sometime this winter. Both services can be used in JOSM or iD, whichever you prefer.
Thanks, and looking forward to hearing from you!
Madeline
p.s. – In case you missed it, Esri recently shared their world imagery with OSM! It looks like a big improvement over Bing in a lot of areas, and it extends far beyond the Metro imagery boundaries:
https://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/2017/08/24/world-imagery-in-osm/
Darrell Fuhriman
On Sep 18, 2017, at 15:41, Madeline Steele <madelin...@gmail.com> wrote:Hello Portland-area OSM mappers,