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 | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| mathew | "How to address Chris's concerns on imagery adding/editing/sharing seems like a tough nut to crack. Is there any way to overlay different mapknitte..." | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| warren | "ooh yeah, lock by default is nice. Basically an extra interaction to put the image in edit mode would be great. " | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| mathew | "I really dig the sidebar concept, full screen map, and loading straight to the edit screen! I agree with Liz, this differs from a Wiki in the cruc..." | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| warren | "Oh sorry, Justin - do you mean the part about But those two views will never change unless edited or deleted by the person who saved them. For th..." | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| warren | "Yeah that's pretty much it -- and if you don't want what other people have added to a given area (an area you're working in, say) you can display o..." | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| justinmanley | "Hmmmm. That's not at all what I had understood from Jeff's comments. Jeff? Could you clarify? " | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| cfastie | "I think (hope) Jeff is describing something like this: I make a map by carefully aligning photos, writing a description, and annotating it. I save..." | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| justinmanley | "Liz - I see. Sure, I can make annotations deletable only by their owners. Ultimately, though, I really think that annotations should be just as f..." | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| warren | "protect carefully constructed maps from careless interference agreed - it was a relatively crude way to do this and there are better means, for su..." | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| liz | "Ah, that hasn't been in line with previous ideas about annotation permissions. We don't want carefully added annotations to be deletable. Based on ..." | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| justinmanley | "Jeff - I have given some thought to edit history. I think that will be a somewhat substantial upgrade, so it may be outside the scope of my projec..." | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| liz | "are you planning to make annotations editable? " | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| warren | "Also, if you merge your branch in and give people an alternate "beta" interface, we can compare them directly, by using /maps/foo (current version..." | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| warren | "This is so great. Yes, current MapKnitter is a Frankenstein of many changes and revisions over the years. Sweep it clean and make it better! One n..." | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| anishshah101 | "This looks like a really good upgrade. Mapknitter would become really user-friendly if we can do this. " | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| liz | "This is super exciting! I have experienced some of these issues when trying to explain how to use mapknitter. So I totally agree with your observat..." | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| liz | "Ok thanks for letting us know! :) " | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| justinmanley | "liz - doesn't look like I'll be able to put anything together for you guys tomorrow (among other things, I had forgotten that the main editing page..." | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| warren | "Hi Justin, thanks for the update... Are you planning to use the existing data models in the annotation feature on mapknitter for the database stora..." | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| liz | "Wow cool Justin. Yes, just let me know on Thursday. For now, we'll plan to simply add annotations of the style that already exist, like adding poin..." | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| justinmanley | "liz - I'll do my best to get it working by Friday. In order to get a bare-bones installation plugged in to mapknitter, I'll need to write some .er..." | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| liz | "This is great! We have a workshop this Friday, will we be able to use these features? We have photos and text to add. " | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| anishshah101 | "I was unaware of the bug before Jeff mentioned but it is occurring each time after a few distorts. I am not sure why that is happening because the ..." | Read more » | over 10 years ago | |||
| btbonval | "I look forward to seeing this work with scaling, but it is coming along very nicely. I agree that there should be a way to drag the whole image. I..." | Read more » | over 10 years ago |