lost tutorial - grabbing google maps elevation values with php/python

August 6, 2008 6:21 PM

Can you help me re-find a tutorial on extracting elevation values from google maps using python (or php, i forget which)?

I would like to directly grab elevation information from google maps from an array of coordinates that I have. I don't want to use web services to do this - i found a tutorial once that explained exactly how to do this, but now i can't find it.. I think it was using either php or python or python+mysql, i forget exactly, but it was a good one.

I remember the screen shots had a map of somewhere around Czech Republic/Poland, and there was a grid of points defined by the users' array. If you know what tutorial I am talking about that would be awesome, or perhaps you know of a similar tutorial (preferably python).

thanks MF!

posted by figTree to computers & internet (5 comments total)

I'd be delighted to be wrong, but I don't think Google Maps offers this data. At least, I couldn't find it a few months ago when I had this same need. I ended up using a web service.
posted by staggernation at 6:40 PM on August 6, 2008

i'm pretty sure mefi user signal did this, but i just skimmed through his thesis (which is amazingly cool btw) and can't find it. if he doesn't post here you might email him. he uses python and i could have sworn he got heights from somewhere on the net...
posted by not sure this is a good idea at 6:42 PM on August 6, 2008

It's definitely doable, and not that difficult... see http://gisdata.usgs.net/XMLWebServices and http://www.earthtools.org for a couple of free services, which are easy to integrate with coordinates pulled from Google. But the question is whether you can get elevations from the GMaps API itself, and as far as I know you can't.
posted by staggernation at 6:49 PM on August 6, 2008

Not exactly what you want, but
"Topographical Overlay will add a KMZ "layer" of official US topo maps on Google Earth. Once installed you can toggle it on or off. When on, the Topo Overlay displays the standard 7.5 minute topos as one seamless map of the country." (courtesy of Cool Tools.)
Only for the U.S., apparently...
posted by TDIpod at 9:36 PM on August 6, 2008

Not from Google maps that I know about. But check out this guys tutorial for creating a topo map from downloadable data. It is post #480 if the link is direct.

http://forums.groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?s=0ad77113eacc486fb69b14342e44884f&showtopic=189762&view=findpost&p=3563764
posted by tgelston at 11:35 AM on August 7, 2008