Computer guys....how can this be done?

[TrpnBils]

I have about half a dozen maps from this area ranging from 1809 to about 1890 or so. What I'd like to do is make a layered map to where I can use a modern topo map as the base and then be able to "turn on" one historical map at a time to see the progression of roads or whatever. Thinking old school, it'd be the digital equivalent of tracing the old maps one by one onto overhead transparencies and layering them that way.

I'm pretty tech savvy, but short of going into Photoshop and turning layers on and off I don't really see a way of doing this. I know it can be done, but I'm not sure how. What would be nice is if I could make each layer like I do on paper where I can include notes (i.e. "This is Aunt Shirley's house today") for position reference.

 

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[ratty64galaxie]

I do this on my iPad using an app called sketch club. You turn the layers on and off as you've mentioned but you can change the opacity on them so you can see through them and align the layers. Once you have them marked, you can merge them together. Never messed with photoshop so not sure if this is the same.


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[TrpnBils]

Yep. You just hit my leve of competency on Photoshop layers, too. "It can be done" but that's all I know! You might also size the same and then print transparencies and use real overlays. Then you could just layer them and stick them on a window.

That's the thing...some of these maps are county-wide or multi-county-wide so to have any detail on them such as landowner names I had to print them large. You can do this in MS Paint of all things... I've got several printed on 3x3 sheets of paper and a couple of 4x4 sheets of paper. I'm in the process of taping and stitching these things together by hand. I think if I shrunk them down to a single sheet like I could do with the actual transparencies it would be too small to see the detail I need.

I do this on my iPad using an app called sketch club. You turn the layers on and off as you've mentioned but you can change the opacity on them so you can see through them and align the layers. Once you have them marked, you can merge them together. Never messed with photoshop so not sure if this is the same.


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I'll take a look into that. I don't use an ipad, but there might be something windows-friendly that I can find. The problem I see with trying to align layers on the maps is that all of these are hand-drawn, so there will be some discrepancies obviously and they're not the same scale. My intention isn't to overlay the entire thing, but if I could overlay "my notes" from one map to another just to highlight areas of interest it'd be cool. Either an on/off feature for the layers or opacity can be done through Photoshop or GIMP (which is freeware, so it's what I use), but it's not very user-friendly in this type of context...too much other crap going on in the same windows. If I have to take that route I will, but it wouldn't be my first choice.

Welcome to the forum, by the way. Thanks for the reply.

 

[Carolina Tom]

Maprika might be what you are looking for...

 

[TrpnBils]

Maprika might be what you are looking for...

I've tried that before but found it hard to use. I'll have to look into it again. Does it require you to align the maps? I know you can upload your own which is nice, but like I said I know these won't align well. Can you do layers on it?

 

[Carolina Tom]

I've tried that before but found it hard to use. I'll have to look into it again. Does it require you to align the maps? I know you can upload your own which is nice, but like I said I know these won't align well. Can you do layers on it?

I have never used it, but the boys that I hunt with use it. I avoid technology for personal reasons. I don't own a computer, I only use the one at work. I believe that once you ID (2) points on the maps (on Maprika), it creates an overlay of them both. I know that my guy has been struggling with it a bit.

 

[TrpnBils]

I have never used it, but the boys that I hunt with use it. I avoid technology for personal reasons. I don't own a computer, I only use the one at work. I believe that once you ID (2) points on the maps (on Maprika), it creates an overlay of them both. I know that my guy has been struggling with it a bit.

Yeah that's how I remember it being too. I may just need to put some more time into it. i gave it a shot about 6 months ago or so but I'll pull it out again now that I have these other maps.

 

[Jason in Enid]

You can do it on google earth. You can load map overlays then scale and orient them as needed, even select the amount of transparency. Turning them on and off is just a matter of clicking and unclicking them in the menu. You can have as many of them as you want selected at once.

I have typed out the explanation of instructions before, so if you search here you should be able to find it.

 

[rogueaviation]

I used Google Earth for the overlays. I took the picture files and loaded them into GE, then you can stretch them around and do a best fit kind of thing with the maps on the topo or roadway view. It worked really well. I even had to take pictures of some of the older maps of my area, as they couldn't be copied, the photos stretched and for on the GE topo map pretty well.

 

[TrpnBils]

You can do it on google earth. You can load map overlays then scale and orient them as needed, even select the amount of transparency. Turning them on and off is just a matter of clicking and unclicking them in the menu. You can have as many of them as you want selected at once.

I have typed out the explanation of instructions before, so if you search here you should be able to find it.

Were you able to get that to work well? I have tried that on several occasions, but with these old, hand-drawn maps I could never get them to line up on hard, known landmarks very well. For example, if I lined up an old, well-used intersection, a bridge, and tried to line up a third landmark I'd end up with the river positioned in the middle of a hillside or something. It seems like I can never get things to work the way they should on both the vertical and horizontal axes at the same time.

 

[Jason in Enid]

Were you able to get that to work well? I have tried that on several occasions, but with these old, hand-drawn maps I could never get them to line up on hard, known landmarks very well. For example, if I lined up an old, well-used intersection, a bridge, and tried to line up a third landmark I'd end up with the river positioned in the middle of a hillside or something. It seems like I can never get things to work the way they should on both the vertical and horizontal axes at the same time.

I got it to work pretty well, but you are correct that older hand-drawn maps do cause some problems like that. You just have to play with it (sometimes a lot) and realize it's not going to be perfect. Sometimes what you think isn't lining up is because its not what you think it should be. I had a problem with that in my ghost town. Trying to get it lined up to a real (large) object on the ground, and scaled to the map scale wasn't working. I finally decided that the ground object wasn't original to the map period, but I did finally find other objects that lined up well.

 

[James/Texas]

I wish you the best of luck in this but I think you are going to find it impossible to do with hand drawn maps. Every one of them will be different and impossible to line up and get them into proper alignment in layers. Maybe you could take copy an existing topo and add new layers, each with the copy of the topo and manually add information you want on each layer. I would guess that would be the best and easiest way to get this done, if you follow what I mean. Good luck on this. It sounds interesting.

 

[TrpnBils]

I wish you the best of luck in this but I think you are going to find it impossible to do with hand drawn maps. Every one of them will be different and impossible to line up and get them into proper alignment in layers. Maybe you could take copy an existing topo and add new layers, each with the copy of the topo and manually add information you want on each layer. I would guess that would be the best and easiest way to get this done, if you follow what I mean. Good luck on this. It sounds interesting.

That's what I'm hoping I could do. Like I said I don't necessarily need every little detail, just my own notes. In some cases I should be able to confirm road or house sites with what I know from in-person visits so that will hopefully get me ahead a little. The one main road here was a travel route for CW soldiers, but nobody seems to have an old map with it on there, so I'm hopefully going to be able to nail that down. In one case where I know the road used to go through there's an old foundation from an 1800s post office there...just in the middle of the woods. I've hunted it a couple of times, but with all the scrap junk left there I've never found anything of value.

 

[SuchMuch]

OziExplorer is a solution.

 

[Eleven Cents]

I've been doing this with old aerial photos using MapTiler. It's the easiest and fastest way I've found to georeference the old images. It produces .mbtiles files that you can host on MapBox or host yourself with something like tileserver-php. You can view the tiles in a browser with various base layers. I'm writing my own Android app so I can carry them around offline.

 

[TrpnBils]

I've been doing this with old aerial photos using MapTiler. It's the easiest and fastest way I've found to georeference the old images. It produces .mbtiles files that you can host on MapBox or host yourself with something like tileserver-php. You can view the tiles in a browser with various base layers. I'm writing my own Android app so I can carry them around offline.

How user-friendly is it?

 

[Eleven Cents]

I think MapTiler is pretty easy to use. There's a free version you can try.

After aligning some photos to Google's satellite imagery, then using the same photos in a Mapbox map, I discovered that Google and Mapbox don't always agree in the alignment of their satellite imagery. And I know that if you zoom in on the Four Corners Monument in a Google map, the state border lines are several feet off from the monument. I'm not sure if the border lines, the satellite imagery, or the monument itself are off. Between map discrepancies and the inaccuracy of GPS, I find that aerial photos are only useful for identifying existing structures that are old, or getting a general idea of what was in an area, not exactly where anything used to be.

 

[chowder]

How user-friendly is it?

I just looked up a video on YouTube on how to implement an overlay in MapTiler. Link to video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=by5sTBs1qOA
I think I may end up trying this software out too. Looks like there's a few iOS apps you can use to view the map along with GPS.