Free Geography Tools

The fine people at the University College of London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, the same ones who released the Google Map Creator described in the previous post, have also released Image Cutter, a program that allows you to use the Google Map pan-and-zoom interface to display a tiled large image at various scales. Written in Java, it will run on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The obvious applications are for general digital images, where it can be used to view them at both large and small scales. This could be useful for displaying maps where you don’t want or need to have geographic coordinates associated with the map (e.g. a general city or college map, or perhaps an imaginary or unusual map from the Strange Maps blog). The image tiles and associated HTML code can uploaded to and hosted at the webserver of your choice.

There’s a Web 2.0 service called MapLib.Net that performs the same function, but also hosts the images for you. There’s a free account with a max storage space of 30 MB, and a maximum image size of 6000 x 6000 pixels; various paid plans are also available that offer larger image sizes and more storage space.