How to maximize Map viewing effectiveness

This article will be about how to view maps in size 6656x3840px per page or bigger.

First I did some testing on my old Firefox 32.0.1 and then I installed new Firefox 47 to reflect the difference.

Fist I set my display to maximum size.  I was able to get 26x15 images of 256 px per size is 390 images per 256px is 6656x3840px per page view. With two displays up to 780 images per one shot! You are limited only by your internet connection and possibly browser performance. To speed up viewing in Firefox, change your cache from disk to RAM. Maybe also using latest Firefox version would help, however now I use old Firefox 32.0.1.

Recently I have managed to display 34x19 images per one monitor. It is still possible to display more if I use ctrl+- (control plus minus sign). It takes 11-12 seconds to load one screen on FF 32.0.1 but on FF 47 is took about 6 seconds or less. However in the case when I enabled development tools the time increased about 2x and the map can even freeze! If you add more images to your display using ctrl+- then you screen most likely will freeze. It happened two times so I give up.

However after few screens of viewing in the Firefox 32.0.1 window freezed because of not enough RAM memory. I do not use disk storage so maybe this is the problem? When I closed the maps.cz application 700MB has been freed. It seems like viewing at 34x19 images per screen is not that good as 26x15 which is slower but secure for 3.5GB RAM on Windows XP. It should be about 40MB of images so I guess the problem is in Firefox performance. Event that the newer version has better performance it is not great still.

First you need to get good monitor and card which is able to display resolution at least 1920x1080px per display/monitor.

Then you go to Windows display settings. I use Windows XP so I go to Desktop->settings->advanced->display->custom->75% to change DPI. I select 75% of the normal size.

You need to restart your computer to get everything as small as possible (a CD with Windows was requested) and then you run browser, go to maps. Enable Development tools usually by ctrl+shift+i or use Tools menu. Then you inspect page with rectangle tool which is placed in the top left corner of Development tools. First you get rid of svg tag (delete it) and then you can inspect the images. You can see the size of images so you can simply calculate how many they are there.

Then in Firefox browser I open a map site like mapy.cz. First I need to display the site as normal not in maximized view. If you are in maximized view you need to go down with F11. Then I use ctrl+scroll down to get smaller characters and images. The result is that the map images are so small that you can display huge map size 6656x3840px. If you need to grab the images, there are plugins for Firefox which you can install. Then you can grap the screenshot - very simple or you can save all the images if you want. They are already saved on your disk when you are viewing them, but you can save them to stay permanently on your disk using Save Images. If you have two displays installed, you can even save 780 images for one shot! You can buy some old cheap display in bazaar (online). You just need to look for some old crappy display which is cheap because you don't need to watch the display when you are downloading images in Firefox browser. You can set your browser in that way that is will be expanded from one screen to another. Next, one can create viewing script with Autohotkey (often referred as AHK) which will run in your PC and will view your images automatically. You could even create 3 windows of the same map so you could watch wider area. With smaller height you can fit one map on both screens in the way, that what you see in the first browser window on top right, you can continue watching in the middle left corner and what is in the middle right corner, you will continue watching in the bottom left corner.

So then you will watch the map(s) from down to bottom. This way you could get width
19968px. Now imagine a software which can join the saved images into one huge image. Cool.


Where to download images?

To maximize viewing in Firefox browser simply disable Disk cache in Tools - Settings - Advanced Settings in a Net tab. Check Do not use management of Memory. Notice this text is translated from check version of Firefox.

Speed, speed, speed, give me what I need!

With a good internet connection about 8MB/s you can view the map source very fast. The speed which I can reach with one monitor on mapy.cz is rather slow. I can view one display per 11-12 seconds. This could be because the mapy.cz send a lot of data with slow speed.

Cca 1m-1.5km/30s which is about 2km in zoom 20 (the highest details).

Whilst with myapp.htm which is Google Maps API v3 on my computer, I can view 4km per 1 minute (240km per hour), e.g cca 6s per one display at zoom 20. Which means that maps.cz is really slow.

Of sure, if Firefox will manage to increase its performance during next years than we could use multithreading and other technologies to get better performance. Hopefully we could get at least 1km per one display width in full zoom of level 20. Now with simple plugin we can save images, rename them and with some good software we can create complete map.