Satellite imagery covers the whole planet, but sometimes you need to see a single street, a rooftop, or a field boundary in fine detail. That is where OpenAerialMap comes in. It is a community catalogue of drone and aerial imagery that contributors have released under open licences, so anyone can view, download, and reuse the images with attribution. Coverage is patchy, because it depends on where volunteers have flown, but where it exists the detail can far exceed satellite imagery. Learning to search it well turns a sometimes-overlooked catalogue into a powerful source for local mapping projects.

OpenAerialMap does not fly drones itself. It indexes imagery uploaded by mappers, researchers, and humanitarian teams, and it shows each dataset's footprint, licence, and resolution on a searchable map. Some uploads are sharp orthomosaics stitched from hundreds of drone photos; others are single aerial frames. Because contributors vary, quality varies too: dates range from recent to several years old, and some areas have overlapping flights while neighbouring areas have none. Treat it as a catalogue to search first, not a guarantee of coverage. If your area has no upload, satellite imagery remains the fallback, and you can note the gap as a reason a future drone survey would add value.

Open the map, zoom to your area of interest, and browse the footprints that appear. Click a footprint to read its title, upload date, ground resolution, and licence before downloading anything. Ground resolution tells you what you can legitimately claim to see: imagery at a few centimetres per pixel can show individual plants or roof tiles, while coarser aerial imagery may only show buildings and roads. Check the date as carefully as the resolution, because a sharp image from five years ago may show a building that no longer exists. Download only the tile or area you need, and keep a note of the source and licence for your final map credits.

Open licences are generous but not unconditional. Most OpenAerialMap imagery uses Creative Commons licences that require attribution, and some restrict commercial use or require derivative works to share the same licence. Read the licence on the dataset page and credit the contributor in your map or report exactly as requested. If your project is commercial, filter for licences that allow commercial use rather than assuming every open image does. Keeping a simple credits list, with dataset name, contributor, date, and licence, takes minutes and prevents awkward corrections later. When in doubt, contact the uploader or choose a dataset with clearer terms.

Downloaded imagery usually arrives as GeoTIFF tiles or as a tile service link. Load GeoTIFFs as raster layers in QGIS and check that they align with a trusted base map; a small shift may mean a projection mismatch that you can fix by setting the correct coordinate reference system. Use aerial imagery as a reference for digitising features, checking satellite classifications, or illustrating a site, rather than as a replacement for ground survey where legal boundaries or safety decisions are involved. For a first project, trace a handful of features you can verify on the ground, such as a path, a hedge line, or a building outline, and compare your tracing with the satellite view. The difference in detail will show you exactly when aerial imagery earns its extra file size.

OpenAerialMap rewards a careful search: check coverage, date, resolution, and licence before you download, and credit what you use. Used that way, community aerial imagery fills the gap between global satellite data and a ground survey, and it often reveals local detail no satellite can match.