After hours Toolkit

Story: Google Earth (beta): a first look

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Picture Postcards from Heaven with Google Earth
How to print real photo postcards from a satellite image of your street or neighbourhood

The free application incorporates maps, driving directions, and satellite images. It allows users to zoom and pan over three-dimensional images of cities and landscapes, drilling down from space to overhead details. With a few steps and tricks it is even possible to produce personalised aerial postcards of a street or neighbourhood without the costs that used to be associated with aerial photography.

The Google Earth Licence limits the use of the image data, but states: “You can personally use an image from the application as long as you preserve the copyrights and attributions including the Google logo attribution. However, you cannot sell these to others, provide them as part of a service, or use them in a commercial product such as a book or TV show without first getting a rights clearance from Google.” The image data, though constantly improving (a new update was released in January), is still patchy in places, but from other areas images can be extracted, which are sufficiently clear to print satisfying aerial postcards of a street or neighbourhood. Google Earth images do not produce the crispest of prints, but are unique and a great surprise and joy for friends, a gift for a housewarming party or suitable image for an invitation card.

Once a suitable jpeg has been cropped and scaled to the size desired and it has been interpolated and saved this can be printed on an inkjet printer or through one of the online photo processing services like http://FotoInsight.com. FotoInsight claims that professional photo processing achieves a higher perceived resolution through the use of a larger number of colours and uses longer lasting inks.

Personalised postcards and greeting cards from satellite images are a welcome change to the Birthday, Anniversary-, Mother’s Day, Season Greetings or Valentines Cards routine. FotoInsight photo postcards have a print area of 14 x 10 cm and the ideal resolution would be 866 x 615 pixel. Folding greetings cards have a print area of 13 x 9 cm where the ideal resolution would be a 799 x 556 pixel digital image file. For all printed cards the image jpegs should ideally exceed 100 kb in size. Once the photograph has been uploaded to http://fotoinsight.com or http://fotoinsight.co.uk the online photo service provides text tools ideal to insert a postcode, name or address details into the aerial photograph. The cards come in sets of ten cards per order and are delivered by mail.

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