GMap Image Cutter Version 1.43 ============================== The GMap Image Cutter is an application designed to take any image or a digital photo and cut it into tiles which are displayed on a Google Map. Using this tool, large images can be published on the web in a format that allows the user to pan and zoom using the standard Google Maps interface. Although publishing large digital photos is the most obvious application, this technique can be used for annotated maps of an area that are not to scale e.g. directions for how to get to the office. Instructions ============ The software is very simple to use. Use File/Open to load a jpeg, gif or tiff. The image will display in the centre of the window and the zoom level slider on the right will show the maximum zoom depth before the displayed image on the map is bigger than the original image. It is possible to move the slider up and down to change the zoom level created, but going past this limit requires the image to be blown up, so the result will be a pixelated image. The number of tiles shown below the slider shows how many files will be displayed when create is pressed. As the zoom depth is increased, this number will increase exponentially. As a general guide, an image of width 8000 pixels only requires zoom level 6 and 1365 tiles. To create a working Google Maps website containing your image, simply click the Create button and press Start. The progress bar shows how far the tile creation still has to go. Once the tile creation has finished, there will be an html file and a directory created in the same directory as the one the original image was loaded from. Double clicking on the html file will open up the image in a web browser. The html file and the directory called 'myimagename-tiles' can be moved anywhere on the disk, or onto a web server, as long as they both remain in the same position relative to each other e.g. both in the same directory. Image Quality ============= Under the 'Processing' menu are two options to control the quality of the images produced. The 'Low Quality Images' option simply resizes the images to fit the Google Map Tiles, while the 'High Quality Images' option uses bicubic interpolation. For this reason, the high quality option takes longer to produce the final result than the low quality option due to each rendered image taking longer to produce. By default the high quality setting is used. NOTE: Java versions below 1.5 do not support bicubic interpolation, so the algorithm used in this case is bilinear interpolation, which will still produce higher quality images than the low quality setting. Publishing on the Web ===================== In order to publish the image on the web it is necessary to obtain a Google Maps API key from Google and insert it manually into the html page. The html page can be opened in a text editor and the line: