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okok3857today at 3:49 PM6 repliesview on HN

I developed and maintain this site so I am both very happy to see it get posted here and also watching htop intently...

I wanted to point out it is a crowdsourcing project, so every overlaid page you see has been placed there by a person, often through large institutional efforts at universities, but also individuals just looking to learn about their hometown through these old maps. Thanks for the interest!


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_fstoday at 8:19 PM

Funny how this pops up on hacker news today. I have been working on an off and on again project in the same vein. But instead of sanford maps, I have been ripping and downloading GLO surveys. I now have about 3TB worth of 200k+ mid 1800 surveys done by the USGS (GLO at the time). My next step was to create a method of presenting this data. Do you think that your OHMG would help me here?

Its a similar problem that you faced, stripping off the extra image data from the map, then overlaying them on a base map. I might have a slightly easier time, since these surveys mostly line up to existing township/ranges of the PLSS, not at individual house/street level like the sanborn maps. I've manually done the process many times, most in ArcGIS, but have used a few others (like oldmapsonline). Your site was new to me, and the presentation looks great.

Here's an example of the type of survey I'm working with. https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en/maps/06317a09-5426-41e0-aa8...

jdmichaltoday at 8:07 PM

Something seems broken with the Tampa, FL map. I get an unauthorized page:

https://oldinsurancemaps.net/map/YK41FR

And this shows no volumes available:

https://oldinsurancemaps.net/viewer/tampa-fl/#/center/-84.77...

Same thing for Key West, FL.

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bduhantoday at 7:07 PM

Great work! I started georeferencing old plat maps and aerial photographs from my area in QGIS and realized quickly it would be hard to ask other for help without a platform like this.

I’ll try running my own and see about importing existing work. Have you thought about extending the public site scope beyond insurance maps?

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garciansmithtoday at 4:05 PM

Thanks for making this, I look at Sanborns all the time doing historic preservation-related work.

Is there a way to quickly search for a specific address or select a point and then see the relevant map? Larger cities have Sanborns covering many volumes, and I see I can use sliders to turn them on and off to find the relevant one, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing a quicker way of finding a specific address.

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dmdtoday at 5:41 PM

Do you use IIIF for this? Do you know about https://allmaps.org/ ?

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selimthegrimtoday at 4:15 PM

Hi Adam! Adam runs really fun events where you get to help him annotate the maps if you’re ever in the New Orleans area

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