MapKnitter
mapknitter

Support Public Lab Today! For the last twelve years, Public Lab has hosted Mapknitter.org so that people everywhere can make maps from their aerial photos. Unfortunately, current circumstances have led us to scale back and take certain services offline. MapKnitter.org will go offline August 15, 2022. The MapKnitter platform runs on a combination of volunteer and paid labor by the many people that build, maintain, and operate it via Public Lab. This is an effective combination thanks to the culture of Public Lab's Coding Community. Public Lab's web ecosystem, including PublicLab.org, MapKnitter.org, SpectralWorkbench.org, Infragram.org and associated projects, takes 20 hours a week from three Code Coordinators and our sysadmin. While cost effective, it is not free. Web hosting and server costs for MapKnitter are approximately $1000 per month. We are doing our best to sustain programming and support for our community, and we need your help. Thank you for being part of our community. We can't wait to be back online with you. Support Public Lab by making a donation today. *Part of the [Grassroots Mapping Curriculum](/wiki/mapping-curriculum) series.* MapKnitter is a free and open source tool for combining aerial images into a map, or composite image. Informally, we call this "stitching a map" and it's useful if you have many images of overlapping or identical areas, and getting either a web map or a printable map from your photos. MapKnitter can make maps from any image source, but it was designed for making maps with aerial photos from balloons and kites. Start using [MapKnitter.org](http://MapKnitter.org) or read on for more documentation! ## Exporting Once you're map is complete, you can download it as a single image in JPG and other formats. Read about the new Cloud exporter here: https://publiclab.org/wiki/mapknitter-cloud-exporter Learn more about [exporting maps in MapKnitter here](/mapknitter-exporting). ## Activities [activities:mapknitter] **** ## Questions [questions:mapknitter] **** ### Advanced * [Decisions with distortions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=S8uUM3p3_Bk#!) - Learn about the design process of stitching maps when images are highly distorted or include tall buildings. This tutorial is in Photoshop, but the techniques are applicable to MapKnitter as well. * [Infrared multispectral compositing](/wiki/mapknitter-multispectral) (no video, in progress) Learn how to combine an infrared dataset with your map to assess photosynthesis. (Also: learn [how to collect infrared imagery](/tool/near-infrared-camera)) ...


Author Comment Last activity Moderation
cmnetto "@ddileona Do you know the altitude or have an estimate? " | Read more » over 9 years ago
stevie "LOVE IT! " | Read more » over 9 years ago
liz "Hi Peter, Fantastic! Thank you. Can you send me a link to NUKIM? What department is professor Han Wei in? I'd like to be in touch. " | Read more » over 9 years ago
peteryoung "Hi Liz, thanks for your appreciation. Because there is water shortage in Taiwan in spring, we want to know how severe the sedimentation really is, ..." | Read more » over 9 years ago
liz "Hi Peter, the coverage you got around the shoreline of the lake is really impressive! Can you share any other information about why you are worreid..." | Read more » over 9 years ago
ajawitz "YAY!!! I took your advice and added a 20 ft fuzzy tail and it worked like a charm! I still have to process all the photos before I can call the fl..." | Read more » over 9 years ago
smathermather "Ah, checksums are a brilliant way to handle that. If memory serves, matches in ODM are image pairs, plus matches for pixel and line. Rotations and..." | Read more » over 9 years ago
warren "We don't currently use matches in MK, but the very initial thing I was going to suggest is to simply visually link the currently selected (or dragg..." | Read more » over 9 years ago
smathermather "Hi @warren, Yes, ODM would need just images, ideally with geo info as well. I suppose the most useful thing for ODM to return would be transformat..." | Read more » over 9 years ago
mathew "Awesome summary of the kites! I've had good luck with a french signal kite but only when it had a long (15' of string) drogue tail attached. it d..." | Read more » over 9 years ago
warren "Super! Lots to think about here but one that floats to the top of my mind is: What would ODM need in terms of inputs to generate feature extraction..." | Read more » over 9 years ago
warren "Done! Auto-scaling and auto-compass now work. @liz check it out! " | Read more » over 9 years ago
warren "@liz check this out -- see if maybe these will work in the new MK feature with auto-altitude and auto-compass! " | Read more » over 9 years ago
mathew "tell me about your glove problems. We are always up for revising kit parts. " | Read more » over 9 years ago
warren "Cool! What's your interest in this site? Have you done an Infragram conversion of this image? " | Read more » over 9 years ago
warren "Ooh, nice! What are you looking to document here? " | Read more » over 9 years ago
patcoyle "Intriguing opportunities for synergy across these platforms and approaches. Thanks. " | Read more » over 9 years ago
warren "Cool! What are you hoping to document at this site? " | Read more » over 9 years ago
patcoyle "Thanks for all the work the development puts into these tools. " | Read more » over 9 years ago
warren "There are two problems: JavaScript generating the image file (with canvas.toDataURL()), which maybe could be done in a web worker... Next, ensurin..." | Read more » over 9 years ago
warren "I was thinking today of the idea from a couple years ago of reimplementing full map export in the client side, and had a thought -- these matrix tr..." | Read more » over 9 years ago
mathew "In a dream universe, I'd love to see the altitude information compared against local altitude data from the USGS so that images were dropped with t..." | Read more » over 9 years ago
warren "Thanks!!! " | Read more » over 9 years ago
warren "Wow, that's great. Looks like sub-10-meter precision perhaps! " | Read more » over 9 years ago