I know there are plenty of tools out there for bulk downloading map tiles (Mobile Atlas Creator, GMapCatcher, GMapMaker). I also realize it is against many of the tile provider’s TOS to use such tools on their service. I would like to essentially do the same thing from my local tile server in order to get folders containing the map tile images (pngs) in order to put on a mobile device for offline usage. The bulk downloading tools out there do not let you add your own tile source. Is there an easy way to do this? A simple script or a tool? I would simply like to specify a bounding box around an area (lets say the city of Pittsburgh), and get all tiles for all zoom levels of that area in the /z/x/y.png directory structure. Please help if you have some insight.
Have you already tried http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/JTileDownloader ?
Inspecting the screenshots there, you can define an alternative tileserver … or am I wrong?
stephan, thanks for the response! I actually just found out about this tool today. It seems to be exactly what I wanted.
Thanks!
What sort of tile server is it? If its a standard Mapnik server, you should be able to pre-render tiles.
eg you can use the generate_tiles.py script. http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/rendering/mapnik/generate_tiles.py
Just change the section with bbox for the area and zoom levels you want.
Or use render_list, see this page with the section for “How do I pre-render tiles?”. http://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/building-a-tile-server-from-packages/