Aerial mapping photos

How come the aerial photos for osm Australia are poor quality and low res? Also when you move out of major areas there are no aerial photos to assist in mapping. Does OSM use the Google Maps or another source?
I hope you can help as I’m trying to do as many regional and off road areas as possible as this is where the major gaps seem to be.

You might want to look into Nearmap.

I don’t really under stand the Nearmaps system, it’s bit too high tech for me at this stage of my learning OSMapping. Why aren’t there decent maps of Australia like we see when view the European areas during editing. Can someone help me out and / or can someone arrange a program or way the general OSmapper get higher res aerials for Australian regional areas?

You don’t really need to understand NearMap’s “system”. If you want to trace from their aerial imagery, just click the Edit tab on OSM to load Potlatch and then change the background source (the “checkbox” button at the bottom left of the screen next to the “camera” button) to “Australia: NearMap”. Check the wiki page in the above link for maps of the areas covered, but they have quite a bit of rural and regional coverage such as most of northern Victoria.

Thanks for the help. It works very well with great detail. One problem is it only covers greater Brisbane, Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast regions. If you look at the NearMap coverage map it shows it’s limits. Any other thoughts on how to get high res statelite maps of country Qld?

I don’t know of any other sources of aerial imagery that would be allowed under OSM’s whiter than white policy on copy from sources.

There is the Qld DCDBlite data that might be useful:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Data.australia.gov.au/Queensland

Where abouts in Qld are you trying to map?

Nearmap is expanding their coverage in a number of places like Toowoomba, Cairns and Mackay…

Hi,
I cannot see ‘Australia: NearMap’ as an option in the background source popup window. Does anyone know why I don’t get this option in the list?
Thanks

I just found the answer in the wiki. ‘The integration has been removed as of September 15, 2010 pending licencing discussions’
So then, does anyone know if or when it will be re-integrated?

It’s unlikely to be re-integrated because of those pushing for ODBL.

Alternatively Bing has been integrated, or you can use JOSM and there is details on the wiki as to how to use Nearmap in the current builds of JOSM.

Thanks for your response John.

It’s good that bing imagery can be used where possible. JOSM is a little intimidating for me at the moment, but I’ll see.