Map To Poster – Create Art of your favourite city

There is a related project which I used several times:

https://github.com/anvaka/city-roads

Edit: it outputs SVGs and you can try it online. Anvaka (author) has other really cool dataviz projects.

San Francisco looks nice, but there seems to be a problem with the projection in some of the sample images. It looks as if it isn't UTM but a global sphere projection, which isn't suitable for local renders. It's suspicious that the word 'projection' isn't mentioned in the Readme.

Great project! It takes a bit of fiddling to get the distance parameter right in some cases, and two possible improvements would be to allow for coordinate input rather than city name so I can point it at a specific spot as the center of the map. Another one would be to output all styles simultaneously so I can visually select from the generated images.

Anyhow, nice work. Thanks!

Also check out prettymapp

https://prettymapp.streamlit.app/

I believe (from a quick code check on my phone) it should be possible to output the images to SVG with a little tweak, thanks to your use of matplotlib?

Is there a reason you’ve defaulted to PNG that I’m missing?

Does anyone have recommendations for how to actually print a poster from images like these?

This repo is fantastic. The README should be the gold standard for OSS. Not to mention how stunning the outputs are. Thanks for sharing.

This really needs to be `uvx` runnable.

That's splendid. I've long wanted to make a jigsaw puzzle out of Sydney's road map, so I can familiarise myself with the layout of roads while having fun. That way I can reduce my reliance on nav app and become one of those old-school drivers.

What happens if there are multiple cities with the same name. Maybe this is a US specific problem, but there are many states with cities of the same name from another state. As a few examples:

Salem, OR and Salem, MA

Portland, OR and Portland, ME

Springfield, IL and Springfield, MO

Dallas, TX and Dallas, GA

Three random themes for anyone who's Czech or likes Prague and doesn't want to set up the script locally: https://imgur.com/a/Ovg8mDW

I tried it in a python3 venv, but the download data step is stuck at 0% unfortunately.

Etsy sellers devastated

Awesome! After I generate, where can I take that super res image and get a high quality photo print to frame?

The map of Venice seems to be the only one whose image is "squeezed" horizontally. Wondering why.

Are you using a coding package or graph-based approach for this, or is it standard image generation? I’ve seen very similar results on https://picxstudio.com —it’s an AI image generation platform.

https://maptoposter.penk.in/

Using Claude Code and OP's library, I've put it on the internets. Web hosting is cheap(free) and generation takes some time

Pretty cool! It would be great if there was a way to set coordinates manually, since Nominatim can sometimes produce mediocre results. Also, would be nice to have a way to render the same map in all themes, not just one.

These demonstrate just how car-obsessed our society is. Depressing.

Looks amazing ! In my free time, i play with my laser cutting machine. It will save me some design time. Thanks

Why are big chunks of Sam Francisco missing (eg around the bridge) missing from the example?

It says there are examples but I can't see them?

what are the blue dots? (not water bodies i think?)

Very cool, thanks for sharing!!

- for those of you that dont want to install this locally, run this inside docker

*`Dockerfile`*

``` FROM python:3.12.10-slim-bookworm

RUN apt-get update -q -y && apt-get install -q -y \ build-essential \ git \ python3-dev \ && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

RUN groupadd --gid 10000 python \ && useradd --uid 10000 --gid python --shell /bin/bash --create-home python

WORKDIR /home/python/app

RUN git clone https://github.com/originalankur/maptoposter.git

RUN chown -R python:python ./maptoposter

# 5. Switch to non-root user USER python

RUN pip install --no-cache-dir --upgrade pip && \ cd ./maptoposter && \ pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt

CMD ["sleep", "infinity"]

```

*`main.sh`*

``` #!/usr/bin/env bash

# https://github.com/originalankur/maptoposter # Read the documentation to change themes and settings for each city

# Get the directory where THIS script is located SCRIPT_DIR=$(cd -- "$(dirname -- "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")" &> /dev/null && pwd) cd "$SCRIPT_DIR" || exit 1

# TODO: kolkata is done already, change to some other city both here and on that notepad.pw link in Chrome readonly CITY="kolkata" readonly COUNTRY="india"

readonly CONTAINER_NAME="map_to_poster"

if ! docker buildx build \ --file "Dockerfile" \ --progress none \ --tag "${CONTAINER_NAME}" \ --quiet .; then printf "Error: %s" "while attempting to build the docker container:${CONTAINER_NAME}" exit 1 fi

if ! docker container run \ --detach \ --interactive \ --name "${CONTAINER_NAME}" \ --tty \ "${CONTAINER_NAME}"; then printf "Error: %s" "while attempting to run the docker container:${CONTAINER_NAME}" exit 1 fi

container_id=$(docker ps -aqf "name=${CONTAINER_NAME}")

if [ -z "$container_id" ]; then echo "Container not found!" else echo "The ID for ${CONTAINER_NAME} is: $container_id" fi

docker exec -i "${CONTAINER_NAME}" /bin/bash << EOF cd /home/python/app/maptoposter python create_map_poster.py --city "${CITY}" --country "${COUNTRY}" EOF

mkdir -p "${HOME}/map_to_poster"

if ! docker cp "${container_id}":/home/python/app/maptoposter/posters "${HOME}/map_to_poster"; then printf "Error: %s" "while attempting to copy map files from container:${CONTAINER_NAME}" fi

if ! docker stop "${CONTAINER_NAME}"; then printf "Error: %s" "stopping container:${CONTAINER_NAME}" fi

if ! docker rm "${CONTAINER_NAME}"; then printf "Error: %s" "removing container:${CONTAINER_NAME}" fi

```

Nice! Thanks