Free Geography Tools

The “blank map, world map” site (sic) has lots of map graphics in GIF, EPS and PDF formats, under the Creative Commons license so they’re free to use. World and continent maps are available (multiple projections for world maps) blank/uncolored, with and without borders; country maps are available with and without borders and subdivision names.

Perhaps the most unique application is an online paintable world map that lets you color in countries with your choice of colors, and then export the graphic file in PNG format in sizes from small (200 x 132 pixels) to large (6000 x 3973):

Click on a country or countries to select, then select the color you want to use for them (note: you need to de-select the country or countries you’ve just colored by clicking on them before coloring the next set). Useful for creating wildly-inappropriate coloring schemes:

Here’s a few additional color applications that might prove a useful complement to the application Kuler (from yesterday’s post) in designing map color schemes.

An online color application: Name That Color. Select a color from the color wheel, and Name That Color will … name that color. Also gives you the RGB and hex numbers for it.

Open source; Javascript and php code available at the website.

Via Download Squad.

Color Cop: A Window desktop application that lets you:

• Determine the color code for a color anywhere on your desktop
• Single-pixel sampling, or 3×3 and 5×5 averaging
• Automatically generates a 42-color palette of complementary colors for your select color
• And more …

Via Lifehacker.

Colorzilla: A Firefox extension that shows the color codes (RBG and hex) for the point under the cursor in the Firefox browser.

Via Lifehacker.

KML Color Converter: Mix and match R, G, B and black, set transparency, and get back the KML color code; gives other color codes as well (like RGB, CMY, CMYK, HSL). Also has a color picker to select colors from anywhere on-screen.

Color Palette Generator, Color Hunter: Online apps that create a color palette based on those found in a graphic or image file. You enter the URL of the image, and get back a palette with the colors in that image.

The Maps Of War site has animated embeddable Flash maps illustrating historical trends, like this one showing the history of the Middle East over the past 5000 years:

And the Library page has a growing collection of links to other animated history maps from across the web.

Via BoingBoing.

A previous post talked about sites where you could find, view and download high-resolution historical and modern maps. But there are also a number of worthwhile sites that, while not allowing high-res downloads, let you view historical maps online.

David Rumsey Map Collection: Probably the best-known online map site, with 15,800 maps viewable, including “antique atlas, globe, school geography, maritime chart, state, county, city, pocket, wall, children’s, and manuscript maps”. There are a number of different map browsing and viewing options, none of which I’ve ever been all that crazy about. Before you even think about using this site, make sure you set your browser and firewall to allow pop-ups from this site, otherwise you’ll go nuts. But once you get past those issues, there’s hours of map-browsing pleasure here.

British Library: Not surprisingly, very strong in historic maps, especially those of the British Isles and Europe. Check out the collections of scanned maps. Higher-resolution digital images of many of the maps are available for purchase.

New York Public Library: Large collection of online maps for NY, the US and the world, and (oddly enough) shaded relief military maps of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Prints available for sale.

Shaded relief map of Reichenburg and Friedland, Austro-Hungarian Military Geography Institute

Know of any other large online map collections? Let me know in the Comments section.