Hi all,
a number of countries release their official orthophotography under open licences, or at least make them free for non-commercial use. Actually using them internationally, however, isn’t easy. Just finding and downloading all the datasets is best done with local knowledge and language skills.
Has anyone tried to organise a community effort around collecting this data into a basemap? I know about OpenAerialMap, but that is used more for crowdsourcing small patches from individual surveys.
By a rough estimate, storing all the source data would take up at least low tens of terabytes, but that seems like a manageable size (“thankfully” plenty of the Earth’s surface has no high-resolution free imagery available). Of course, there would be more work than just gathering the data, but I think even that would be a good start to a free orthoimagery map.