How to Download High Resolution Google Satellite Imagery using Universal Maps Downloader

Hello everyone, welcome to another GIS Tutorial for Beginners. In this article, we will show you how to download high resolution Google satellite imagery. We are going to use a special software called Universal Maps Downloader. It is a tiny but powerful tool to download high resolution satellite imagery. It supports Google Satellite, Bing Imagery, and many others.

Universal Maps Downloader is a tool that help you to get small tile images from Google Maps, Here maps, Openstreetmap, Yandex Maps, The national map, Yahoo Maps, Mapquest, Gaode map, Tencent Maps, Baidu Maps, Tianditu, Arcgis Online Maps, OneMap for Singapore, Whereis for Australia, mapy.cz, Mappy, Waze Livemap, Hikebikemap, Sentinel-2 map, Strava Gloabal Heatmap, Wikimapia, GoMap.Az, Longdo Map, etc.

Basically, this software will download tile images from the server and then we can combine these tiles into a large and high resolution satellite imagery. To get full features, you will need the Universal Maps Downloader full version. It cost about $60 and you can buy it from this link. So, let’s get started.

Steps to Download High Resolution Google Satellite Imagery

1. First, open UMD and then give a new task name. Select Google Satellite Maps from the Maps type.
2. Specify the zoom level. The higher zoom level produces better quality imagery but it takes much longer.
3. Now, specify the area to download using the Left and Right Longitude, Top and Bottom Latitude.
4. Specify the path to save the tile images.
5. Click Start

Wait until the download process is completed. Once the download process is completed, we need to combine the tile images. Go to Tools >> Map Combiner. This Map Combiner tool will automatically stitch all images into a single large image. You can choose the product image format such as JPG, GeoTiff and PNG.

To use Map Combiner, follow these steps below

1. Open Map Combiner
2. Click Open button and search for the task file you created from the previous download step
3. Choose the format
4. Click Combine button.
5. Wait until the process completes

Thank you for reading this article. I hope you enjoy it and see you on the next GIS Tutorial.