Even just a decade ago, getting an aerial map of your golf course meant hiring a photographer and a plane (or finding a friendly club member with a pilot’s license) and piecing together a montage of photos. The result was often unsatisfactory in terms of quality, and the photo map itself began becoming obsolete the day it was created.
Now, up-to-date, relatively high-quality maps of your property are just a click away on dozens of sites on the Web. And many are free.
The most notable satellite mapping site is Google Earth (www.earth.google.com). Like pretty much everything Google does, the site offers cool bells and whistles like the ability to rotate your view, zoom in and out and even do a ground-level flyover. For an extra $20, you can get an enhanced version that’s highly recommended for large format printing and better reproduction quality.
Another great thing about Google Earth is that it integrates the Google Map function. In short, you can get an image of your course along with the standard graphic mapping and “get directions” function that’s so useful for those of us who travel a lot. Why wouldn’t you want a link to the image and map of your course on your facility’s Web site? It’s free, simple to do and lets visitors find you quickly (which is one of the top reasons golfers say they use the Web).
Some nerd actually has built a site using Google Earth that catalogs images of a bunch of golf courses throughout the world for your browsing pleasure. Check out www.golfworldmap.com. You can even submit your own course to its growing list.
Another option is TerraServer (www.terraserver.com), which offers some views for free, but because it’s owned by the evil Microsoft empire, most of the better features and highest quality images are pay-for-play. I’m not sure why you’d pay for these when a quick serve of my home address in Rocky River, Ohio, on Google Earth produced an image so clear you could literally see my dog playing in the backyard (fortunately, you could not see the two weeks worth of soggy doggy doo I’ve neglected to pick up since the weather finally turned bad up here).
Got another imaging site you like or want to give us a look at your course? Click below to jump over to the GCN forum and post it there.
