britainfromabove.org.uk in full glory

[AndiS]

A while ago, I learnt from Paul that you can get old aerial images from http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk in high resolution if you register, which is for free.

To save bandwidth, they show them is a tiny part of the browser window. Right-clicking on what you see there gets you a single tile (of 2 or 3 by 2 or 3) which you can save, but saving them all sounds like a major undertaking. If you do that, you can then do a jigsaw with them, which can be nice, but not for one like me.

So I developed the following scheme workflow:
Before you start, get image4.html and image5.html. Save them somewhere, don't worry if they don't make any sense at the moment.

1. Create a new folder and copy image4.html and image5.html there.
2. Move to the top left and zoom in.
3. Do "save page" in your browser. You will find a ...-files folder where you saved it, where ... is the name you gave it. If you don't, you selected "save HTML alone" instead of "with content" or whatever your browser calls it.
4. In that folder, file .jgp files named 4-x-y or 5-x-y where x and y are in the range of 1 to 3.
5. Copy them to a new folder named images.
6. Double-click image4.html or image5.html, depending on whether your image bits start with 4 or 5. If they only start with 3, zoom in more and restart at #3.
7. You will should see the image parts captured up to now in the browser.
8. Drag the image in the other browser window (at britainfromabove.org.uk) to the left, by its full width, plus maybe 1/5.
9. Repeat from #3 to the end of the line. Reload image4.html (or 5) repeatedly to be sure that you did not miss a tile.
10. When you reach the right margin, move down, again a bit more than the full height of the visual part. Repeat from #3, moving left now.

When you are done, you can delete the file containing the original webpage. It will take the ...-files folder with it to the trash, that is why you copied the image snippets out.

Should you wish to keep more than one image in the same folder, do the following.

1. Rename a copy of images5.html (or 4) to whatever you like.
2. Open it in any text editor and replace all occurrences of "images" by something like MyFirstImage.
3. Rename the folder images to MyFirstImage.
4. Double-click the new HTML file (the copy of images5.html (or 4)) to see if it worked.

Alternatively, you could replace "images/" by nothing and copy images5.html (or 4) to the folder holding the snippets and rename the folder and you are done. But beware that the HTML file which you want to double-click to see the image will always be at the bottom of the file list, unless you prefix the filename with an underscore (_).

For still further advanced usage, you can also get a clever Excel Sheet here. It has two sheets (tables). In Image Names, you specify the folder name in A1 for zoom level 5 and A21 for zoom level 4. Delete the content of these cells if you want to keep images5.html in the same folder as the snippets.

If you know about Excel formulas, you can devise all sorts of snippet naming conventions by modifying the formulas in B3 and neighbours to the right and bottom. But I don't see a need for that in connection with britainfromabove.

Table/sheet HTML in the Excel Sheet contains the HTML code to show an HTML table of all your snippets. Copy lines 1 to 19 or lines 21 to 32 to an editor that gives you control over the file extension and save your creation with extension .htm or .html.

[Pauls]

Some of the oblique images are stunning - you all need to join up and check this out - it really is a magnificent resource !!

Brian - can you show one of your oblique photos as an example Please ??

Thanks.

Cheers
Paul

[briyeo]

Yes Paul, I will just put the link it is quite a large image. Not all the images are as clear as this one but there is still a great deal of information there.

https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3089/130 ... ca1f_o.jpg

Another one, both images show areas of Derby's Great Northern line.

https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3070/130 ... c3be_o.jpg

[hertsbob]

Wow! They are incredible!

[Nobkins]

Stunning resource. I could spend a lot of time just browsing.

[Pauls]

Britain From Above have recently released several thousand more images. I was lucky and got quite a few images of the Charnwood Forest Railway at Loughborough.

Remember to sign up so that you can zoom in on the images - the detail is often amazing !

Cheers
Paul

[Hack]

This is great stuff. I can only hope that we'll get something like this in the States.

[Pauls]

This is great stuff. I can only hope that we'll get something like this in the States.

I bet there were companies in the USA doing this sort of thing. The USAAF would almost definitely have done vertical recon photo's. The RAF did the whole of the UK at various altitudes to show bomb damge and rate of recovery from the end of WW2 and into the 1950's - this is also available at the NMR in the UK and is very useful for railway modellers. - Also of interest the German Luftwaffe also did vertical photo recon for obvious reasons and I understand this is also available - a little further in time the next to take an interest was the USSR - again I'm told this is available somewhere ! - The problem is researching who has this stuff.

Cheers
Paul