Crowdfunding for orthoimagery - anyone in?

[sizziano 172]

Ortho4XP in last version is fast and easy. What's the problem then?

 

1) As said above unlimited and free download can end any day: the more user start using O4XP the more traffic charged on Bing server. SOme are making lots of yiles at L18 or L19 which means hundreds of GBs

 

2) Crucial point: Downloading and creating a "good" tile is not that easy: sometimes it happens, sometimes textures are mixed, differently coloured, with artifacts, costs don't look good...A fair amount of time is needed to balance colours, give a certain coherency to different textures, try several water and dem ratio...For example I've tried days to generate a decent Venice Ortho and I'm still not satisfied with a small portion where I cannot get rid of terrain which should be water. Eventually I'd like to share my work but without a common repository it's impossible.

More, look at the Norway tiles made by Oscar himself available at Zone Photo: simply stunning, I could waste days without never coming close to that result.Same for Normandy, but they are all baked dds, if I liked to change lod at a given airport I could not.

 

For sure. You could spend a ton of time making every ortho perfect, color corrected etc. But for me as long as the definition is good and there are no clouds it's fine for my uses.

[Oscar Pilote 22]

Hi,

Here is what I would find good to have :

 

1) A public repo for .mesh files. The .mesh file already contains all the relevant vector and raster information, and Step 3 can be performed straight from it by adding the choice of ortho

covering. And there is no legal issue with the information it has if it is derived from public data. They would be accompagnied with information on the vector and elevation data that were used to build them.

New free sources of high res DEM and vector data are poping almost each day, and local users know better where to look at them. But when a high res DEM for 1 tile can be more than 1Gb (and requires quite some time to process/reproject etc), the resulting .mesh once 7ziped is only a few tens of Mb and is ready for use. Perhaps it's wise to think of a few mainteners that would receive the uploads and accept or refuse them based on quality and/or already existing stuff.

 

2) A public repo for free imagery already cut in the good format and possibly "uniformized" at least to the extent of the upload.

 

If there is sufficient added value in 2) then people will stop downloading from the big two (although I am not too much worried about these services cutting us access because my intuition is

that local sources will end-up replacing them almost completely)

 

3) Additionnal server(s) coming in support of zonephotos; Pascal who is running it can made it transparent so that there would be only one website entry but more than one server below. Actually

he also told me long ago that something like 1) he could implement it on zonephoto as well, he's presently writing an app to replace the in browser java applet.  These servers could go on

playing border line as they do  now, Pascal did indeed contacted Bing and Google long ago and they were only a bit vague in their answer.  The present cost of the zonephoto server is something

like 40$ a month (I think its BlueHost).

 

Now that said, I would be terrible at trying to manage even parts of such things, so please go on for the best !