2017
This project was more about curating than creating.
I didn’t draw any of this.
It kinda seems like Disneyland might have some talented
people working there.
A little trivia: Sammy McKim was a little kid in just about every movie back in the early western movie era. Well, at some point, he turned down a shot at working with John Ford (possibly the most revered director of all time) and Maureen o’Hara to become an artist. This would eventually set him on a path to work for Walt Disney as his main cartographer for the Disney Parks. McKim would go on to make the first souvenir map of the Magic Kingdom in 1958. His stuff was amazing and intricate.
I was recently planning a trip to the happiest place on earth and saw that Disney teamed up with another slightly talented group of people at Google Maps to make an epic stylized map of the entire Disney footprint in Anaheim, Ca, with the same attention to detail and character that McKim had applied to those first maps. Since you can only navigate the map in a little window on their website, I looked everywhere for a the full-res image that I can zoom into without seeing the hundreds of little “restroom,” “attraction” and “churro cart” icons that get overlaid all over the online map.
With Google Chrome’s “inspect element” feature, you can get into all the code on most sites that you visit. After a couple failed attempts, I figured out where those map files live as well as the number structure that they used to stack it.
Each of these images are 512x512px and you could eventually build out all of Disney:Anaheim, or for the waaay more ambitious, Disney:Orlando. I stopped at 368 tiles, after I pieced together all of Disneyland and California Adventure Parks. The image to the left came from the address: “https://secure.parksandresorts.wdpromedia.com/media/maps/prod/disneyland/32/19/90412/209766.jpg”
From the address above, you can see which numbers coincide with the grid on the left (clickable). So, for instance, if you wanna see the part of the map with Tom Sawyer Island, change those last couple numbers to “90408/209766.jpg“
Mickey’s Fun Wheel: 90407/209778.jpg
Sleeping Beauty’s Castle: 90412/209764.jpg
The Lego Store in Downtown Disney: 90404/209771.jpg
Obviously, this is all useless if all you wanna do is look at the map; just view it on their site. But if you wanna go find all the tiles and build your own map, this might be your best bet. Just keep in mind that each jpg on each horizontal line has the same file name, so you’ll get confused if you’re just saving them according to what they’re called off the server.
See the file scaled down to 35% here.