Capture embedded google map image with Python without using a browser

Question

I have noticed that, from Google Maps page, you can get an \"embed\" link to put inside an iframe and load the map in a browser. (no news here)

The image size can be

Answer 1

Rather than trying to use the embed link, you should go directly to the Google API to get images as static graphics. Here's the link to the Google Maps static image API - it looks like you can just pass in the long/lat parameters in the URL just as you do for the normal embeddable one. For example:

http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=-30.027489,-51.229248&size=600x600&zoom=14&sensor=false

gives you an 600x600 street-level overview centered on the co-ordinates you give above, which seems to be Porto Alegre in Brazil. Now you can use urlopen and PIL as Ned suggests:

from cStringIO import StringIO
import Image
import urllib

url = "http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=-30.027489,-51.229248&size=800x800&zoom=14&sensor=false"
buffer = StringIO(urllib.urlopen(url).read())
image = Image.open(buffer)