Land Information of New Zealand has made available a great set of 1:50,000 scale Topographic Maps available online. I downloaded all 455 of the maps covering the main island of New Zealand and converted them to a seamless Google Earth overlay.
The maps show roads, placenames, contour lines, elevations points, etc, and make a great tool for planning hiking trips and other outdoor adventures. Since they are Google Earth overlays, you can also adjust the transparency of the topographic maps to compare the maps with the underlying imagery available from Google Earth. You can also see the names of features from Google Earth on the maps.
There are two versions of the topographic map overlay available. The free version is designed to be used online and has highly compressed images to allow for faster loading. The Pro Version is designed to run from your local computer, does not require an internet connection, and has much higher image quality.
The Pro Version is almost 9 gigabytes. Make sure you have enough space on your computer and a high speed internet connection before purchasing.
| Free Version | Pro Version |
| Internet required | No internet required |
| Lossy compression | No image compression |
| Reduced resolution | Same resolution as source |
| Free | $30 |
| Download | Purchase |
 Free Version |
 Pro Version |
The original GeoTIFF files can be downloaded (very slowly) from LINZ.
The maps are Sourced from LINZ and Topo50. Crown Copyright reserved.
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[...] Street Views, USA Matt Fox at Google Earth Library has just created a very impressive topographic map overlay for New Zealand. The imagery is lined up perfectly, and amazingly [...]
This is tremendous work. I take it that it’s impossible to separate the overlay out into distinct layers? E.g., Retain just State Highways and native forest, etc.
Correct, it is not possible to separate out the different layers with the way I have it set up. Although I think much of that data is also available as vectors. It would be possible to bring the vector data into google earth, but I have no plans to do that.
Good work!
As I already have most of the geotiffs myself – actually converted to .ecw & .tab files (for MapInfo Pro),
could I easily set this up to grab the images from my own computer instead? Perhaps by using file:/// instead of http:// inside the KML files?
To display in Google Earth, they must first be cut into smaller tiles. For example, there are about 48,000 tiles for this particular map overlay. Does it load slowly?? I might be able to change some of the code around to get them to load more efficiently, especially when you first load them.
[...] Fox at Google Earth Library has just created a very impressive topographic map overlay for New Zealand. The imagery is lined up perfectly, and amazingly [...]
[...] New Zealand Topographic Map « Google Earth Library I downloaded all 455 of the maps covering the main island of New Zealand and coverted them to a seamless Google Earth overlay. The quality and resolution of the source images has been retained, so they might load a bit …http://www.gelib.com/new-zeala .. [...]
[...] New Zealand Topographic Map « Google Earth Library I downloaded all 455 of the maps covering the main island of New Zealand and coverted them to a seamless Google Earth overlay. The quality and resolution of the source images has been retained, so they might load a bit …http://www.gelib.com/new-zeala .. [...]
This is a fantastic resource, it must’ve taken a lot of work. Is it possible to split the overlay into smaller files, say South Island and North Island for example, to make the downloads a bit smaller?
Cheers,
Kev
Absolutely fantastic! Many thanks. This is invaluable for planning climbing/tramping trips – being able to swap between and satellite and contours is great to help visualise the terrain. Extremely useful for SAR as well.
Any chance of putting the Topo250 series on as well? Either as a separate layer, or combined with the Topo50 layer and displayed map series depending on zoom level.
Thanks for your hard work!
Had great success with the Topo overlay, (thanks for the great work in preparing the maps), but now it refuses to work. What happened? I get several versions of NZ Topo Map on Places” and in “Temporary Places” but none seem to display a topo overlay?
Sorry about the speed issue. The server that the NZ maps are on is in the middle of a 60+ gigabyte upload that will take a several more days to complete, so I think that is probably causing problems right now. Due to tax reasons, I’m only able to sell digital downloads and would be looking at a 10 gigabyte download for the NZ maps so not sure how practical that would be to download.
But….thanks for reminding me about this problem. A couple things. 1) I just made a small tweak that should help significantly, so please let me know if they are loading any better. Note that you should right click on the layer and select “refresh” to see the improvement. Keep in mind that the batch upload is still going on right now so will probably still be slower than normal for a few more days, but you should still see some improvement now.
Also, I’m going to try recompiling the maps using a different method, but I’m not sure yet if that will work or not due to the enormous size of this overlay.