Skip to content
All guides

Free alternatives to Nearmap in Australia, state by state

By Mazdak Ghasemi · Last checked 12 October 2026

Every Australian state and territory publishes aerial imagery you can look at for free, and some let you load it into GIS software or download it. None of them matches Nearmap on how often the imagery is refreshed. Whether a free source is enough depends on three things: how recent the imagery has to be, whether you only need to look at it or have to work with it, and what the licence lets you do.

What you are comparing against

Nearmap is a commercial subscription. By its own figures it captures at 5.5–7.5 cm per pixel, covers up to 95% of the Australian population, and re-flies areas up to six times a year. Government programs fly most places far less often, so the free imagery is often good but older.

What "free" means here

The word covers three different things, and most disappointment comes from mixing them up:

  • Free to view: you can look at the imagery in a government web map. Nearly every state offers this.
  • Free to use in your software: there is a web service you can add to QGIS or ArcGIS.
  • Free to download and reuse: you can save the pixels and the licence allows your intended use. This is the rarest.

Always read the licence on the dataset's own page before using imagery in a product or report. Licences differ between states, and sometimes between two years of the same state's imagery.

State by state

StateWhere to lookWhat is freeMain limit
NSWNSW Imagery basemap, Historical Imagery ViewerViewing, under a Creative Commons Attribution licenceCapture dates vary by area
VICGovernment map viewers such as MapShareViewing onlyThe Vicmap Basemaps service needs a paid subscription
QLDQueensland Globe, QImageryViewing, plus free JPEG downloads of historical photosImages still under licence must be purchased
WALandgate Map Viewer PlusViewing current and historical imageryExtracts and scans are sold
SALocation SA Map ViewerViewingIt is a viewer, not a data service
TASLIST State Aerial Photo BasemapViewing, plus web servicesMosaic mixes dates; check each year's licence
ACTACTmapiViewing, including four urban captures a yearLicence is set per capture
NTNT Atlas, Aerial Photography Search PortalViewing and searching the photo indexIt is an index of frames

New South Wales

Spatial Services publishes the NSW Imagery basemap, described as a collection of aerial and satellite imagery for web map viewing, curated to show the most recent data at the highest available resolution. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. For older imagery, the Historical Imagery Viewer is built for searching and displaying historical imagery of NSW, with aerial photography from 1930 to 2005.

Victoria

Victoria's imagery is made available in government web mapping applications such as MapShare, where you can view it for free. If you want it as a service in your own software, that is Vicmap Basemaps, which requires a subscription with a licence fee based on your organisation and type of use; a one-month evaluation licence is available on request. Members of the public and the private sector who need the imagery itself purchase it from the state's spatial data retailers.

Queensland

Queensland Globe displays aerial imagery mosaics dating from 1930 to the present; where images are still under licence, they must be purchased. QImagery is the historical library: more than 900,000 high-resolution aerial photographs from the 1930s onwards, viewable online and downloadable for free as JPEG, up to eight frames per request. Those frames are scans, not map-ready images. Corrected orthophotos in TIFF or ECW format are sold.

Western Australia

Landgate's Map Viewer Plus is an online viewing tool offering current and historical aerial imagery at no cost. Landgate describes its imagery as usually finer than 1 m, with cities and townsites captured at 10 or 15 cm and broad-area coverage at 50 cm. The Perth metropolitan area has imagery from 1948 onwards, while some parts of the state have been flown only once in 70 years. Custom extracts are ordered and paid for.

South Australia

The Location SA Map Viewer lets you view road, satellite and topographic maps of South Australia and look at a range of government information over them. It is a viewer, so treat it as a way to inspect a site, not as a source of imagery for analysis. Some historical imagery is published as open data; see the guide to historical aerial imagery below.

Tasmania

The LIST State Aerial Photo Basemap is a seamless mosaic of orthorectified aerial images covering the whole state. It is compiled from images of varying quality and from multiple time periods, with the highest-quality image preferred, so an older image may be used in place of a newer one and neighbouring areas can be years apart. The resolution varies, with many urban areas at a higher resolution. The LIST publishes a separate map service for each year's compilation, and the licence is stated on each: the 2024 compilation is published under Creative Commons BY 3.0 AU, while the 2025 compilation refers to the LIST web services terms and conditions. Check the one you plan to use.

Australian Capital Territory

ACTmapi makes aerial photography from 1951 to the present available for free, with the licence set out for each capture. Since February 2019 the ACT Government has committed to supplying seasonal urban imagery, with four captures a year, and the whole territory is captured at least once a year. That is the closest any free program comes to Nearmap's refresh rate.

Northern Territory

The NT Government's land information pages point to the NT Land Information System for the NT Atlas and for aerial photography. Its Aerial Photography Search Portal indexes photographs captured or acquired by the NT Government from the early 1940s to the present, searchable by address, place name, coordinates or a drawn area, and filterable by year. It shows which photograph frames cover your site, so use it to find out what exists before asking for copies.

The national fallback: Sentinel-2

If no aerial imagery is recent enough, Digital Earth Australia publishes Sentinel-2 satellite imagery for the whole country, corrected and ready for analysis, under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Its finest bands are 10 m per pixel, so it will not show a roof or a fence line, but the collection is updated daily and it is the right tool for vegetation, water, fire and land-use change over larger areas. See the guide to Digital Earth Australia and ELVIS for how to get it.

When Nearmap is still the right choice

  • You need imagery from the last few months, in a city or large town.
  • You need the same site at several dates within one year, for construction progress or compliance.
  • You need consistent resolution across many sites in different states.
  • You need oblique views, measurements from imagery, or derived products such as building footprints.

If none of those apply, check the free source for your state first.

Find what covers your site

Terrascout lists free and commercial imagery side by side for any Australian location, with resolution, revisit time and how you access it. Describe your project to get a ranked list, or ask the Copilot a question such as "what imagery covers Ballarat?".

For older photography, see the guide to historical aerial imagery in Australia.

Sources

Every fact above was checked against the pages below on 12 October 2026. Programs and licences change, so confirm on the source page before you rely on a detail.