A family member grew up in the 1950s in the Finnish town shown here: https://kartta.paikkatietoikkuna.fi/?zoomLevel=8&coord=275556.5004187513_6639629.266135304&mapLayers=801+100+default,3400+100+ortokuva:indeksi×eries=1950&uuid=90246d84-3958-fd8c-cb2c-2510cccca1d3&noSavedState=true&showIntro=false&lang=en
I wanted to surprise this person with a nice, big, physical copy of it for them to study and dream back to those young days and look at all the streets and locations from above, etc. As one might expect, a lot has changed since then.
Sadly, no matter how I tried, I could not download the full-resolution aerial photo. I spent many hours going through all the features and “data download” sections of their entire website. It’s the Finnish government’s website for maps/satellite/aerial photos. They have a lot of misleading “teaser” links which hint at this being possible, but they all turn out to be dead ends. The data is not available for direct download outside of that (very hard to find) map system which I’ve linked to above.
I contacted them and asked them to please send me a physical copy, but they don’t do that at all. Plus they wanted me to pay a huge fee to even just send me the digital files. I simply cannot justify paying that amount of money and still not even get a physical map. If I only can have the digital copy, I want it without paying them money, since they clearly have digitized it already since it can be viewed (but who knows for how long?) through their web service. I could understand that they would want to get paid some “administration fee” if they had to actually digitize the photos on-demand, but that’s obviously not the case here. See for yourself how you can zoom in quite far on that view.
I have obviously tried to “right-click, save image”. This results in a very low-res copy, unless you zoom in all the way, but then you only get one small “slice” of an enormous area of such images. I have also looked at the network tab in my browser and can see that, as is typical, it loads in many “squares” which it stitches together fore viewing in the browser. I have thought about writing a script to fetch all those images, but even if I manage to do so, it’s very unclear how exactly I would be stitching them back together into one huge image.
Is there some reasonable way to automate the download of all the fully zoomed-in, high-res “pieces” of the entire area shown on the link above, turning them into one single large PNG image?
