mapsnatcher is a bot to automatically download and splice together tiles from
QGIS maps. This simple system uses a URL such as
http://mapwebsite.com/z/x/y.png, where z is the zoom level, and x and y
are the coordinates of the tile.
You can use a tool such as ChromeCacheView to find these URLs easily.
You will need ImageMagick and its development headers installed in order to build the dependencies. For Ubuntu these are:
sudo apt-get install imagemagick libmagickwand-dev
Once set up, install through RubyGems:
gem install mapsnatcher
To process larger maps, you may need to comment out or modify the resource
policies in /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml.
Usage is as follows:
mapsnatcher http://mapwebsite.com/0/xxx/yyy.png
Place XXX and YYY (case-insensitive) where the respective coordinate
numbers would be in the URL. You will then be prompted to enter the X and Y
boundaries that you would like to capture.
mapsnatcher -b http://mapwebsite.com/0/xxx/yyy.png
If you are unsure of the boundaries and would like to capture the entire map,
add the -b argument and you will only need to enter one valid coordinate;
mapsnatcher will do the rest.
If you would like to save the tiles, add the -s argument.
Coordinates can be passed into mapsnatcher as arguments:
mapsnatcher http://mapwebsite.com/0/xxx/yyy.png -x 200-300 -y 200-250
mapsnatcher http://mapwebsite.com/0/xxx/yyy.png -b -x 200 -y 200
And the output file may be specified with -o:
mapsnatcher http://mapwebsite.com/0/xxx/yyy.png -o map.jpg
If coordinates and output are not specified, you will be prompted for them.