Yesterday, after having visited my sister, her husband and two daughters last week-end and become inspired by their DIY photo albums turned books, I too had a peek at Gör din egen bok (.se) (Swedish för "make your own book" -- visit for a fantastically cheesy sample of how it's pronounced). A rather nice web site lowering the bar almost to making it viable to organize and layout a book on a coffee break, if you already have the photos (and/or text you want to go with them).
Not without its kinks; the java photo uploader applet wouldn't manage to convey the bits of my local images from my macbook, and the site click path to the alternative image dropper (via classic form upload) was hidden rather well, until I managed to bookmark it by pasting together attributes scraped from forms with Firebug. (I reckon you might have to glean up the folderId number on your own to get it to work.)
Anyway, I thought I'd set myself up with a book of nostalgia about Spring in Linköping, where I have been living the past decade -- as I'm planning on moving now, relocating to San Francisco, where I have been head hunted by friends of Jesse Andrews' after our run-in with eachother on hacking away at Book Burro. (It has been literally taking me forever to wrap up my CV, ask peers I have worked with in the field of open source and user scripting for references and letters of support for my petition for an O1 extraordinary persons' visa, and I am really looking forward to being through with it.)
Not really having all that many photos taken there though, and with the smallest book format on offer covering a full 20 pages, I asked around friends whether they wanted to chime in a photo or two on the same theme (and location), before figuring that a map would be neat. I'm still big on Google Maps, even though my blog header rotted and hasn't been revised for the Maps v2 upgrade in November, so I fired up Google Earth to see if I couldn't get some nice visuals there.
Not quite satisfied with what I got, I recalled having read about people doing their own Google Maps photo stiching, and with a bit of help from two articles by Pascal Buirey and Charlie Savage and some guesswork, I managed to wrap up a small pike script to do the scraping for me. (The best part of which was the triumphant moment when my mercator projection latitude compensation suddenly came up with the same coordinates as does Google. :-)
It didn't take long to forget that I was really working on picking up some images for a book, but I eventually did have a decent Google Maps fetcher, to pick a w by h tile segment grid around any given latitude/longitude coordinate and zoom level (granted that Google Maps has satellite image data for it), and paste them together into a big png, jpeg or similar image. It ended up somewhere slightly above "crude", yet below handling geocoding, detecting user error and writing mail and I'm kind of glad I stopped there. (Remember to credit image data copyright holders appropriately if you use it!)
The code requires a typical pike 7.6 (or later) installation, and understands the --help command-line argument for a bit of sparse documentation. The linked articles suggest you may end up getting blocked from the tile servers if you choke them and that it is a good idea to cache tiles. All downloaded images get cached in ~/.gmap/ for you, where you may clean up or not as you please. There is no garbage collection of this cache or code to check whether there is a more recent version of a tile at the image server, so you might want to wipe this directory, if it was a long time since you last ran the tool.
Enjoy! I wonder if I'll finish that photo book. :-)
