Guide to Creating Personalized Maps using Google My Maps

Posted on April 10, 2007 at 9:38 pm

Google keeps coming out with stuff faster than Microsoft can break things! Goodness. I just played around with a new feature of Google maps called My Maps. I’ve been looking for this type of feature before, but didn’t really like any of the mashups that were already out there. Most of them were geared towards a niche like tracking your running routes or something similar.

With My Maps, Google lets you create personalized maps with rich text formatting, HTML code, pictures, and even YouTube videos!!! You can create a whole story of your life or of whatever and make it quite interactive. So next time you go on a trip, use My Maps to plot out each place you visited, post pictures and share the whole thing with your family and friends. Of course, hopefully it won’t make anyone jealous!

Here’s an example map that I created about the city I live in, New Orleans.

New Orleans Personalized Map

You will need to create a Google account if you have not already done so in order to use the My Maps feature. Once you’re in, click on the My Maps tab to get started.

Click Create a new map and give your map a name and description. Click OK and Google will zoom your map all the way out so you can see the entire United States! Of course your map can be local or it can have points all over the world! Simply perform a search for a location to get started (like your street address) and you’ll see an option called Save to My Maps.

Now you’ll be able to save your first point of interst onto your map. Give it a title and choose an icon. The default is the blue bubble point with the black dot in it. Type whatever text you like and have fun with the formatting! You can change the font type, font color, make it into a link, bullet your text, and even add a picture (the fun part!). In order to use a picture, however, you need to have your picture already upload to some sort of photo sharing site such as Picasa Web Albums or Flickr.

You can also add these little pin points anywhere you like on the map by simply using the set of tools in the upper left hand corner. You can drop a pin, draw lines, or draw shapes.

Just click on the blue pin and click anywhere you click on the map. Another box will appear where you can type in the title and description, add a picture, etc. Click on the zigzag line and click on the map to begin a line. You can continue extending the line by click on other spots on the map. When you want to finish the line, double click on the last spot. In my map, you’ll see I created a funny looking triangle.

The nice part is that once you draw your shape, you can easily edit it by simply clicking on the handles (which are the white square boxes) and adjusting it as you like. For example, here you can see I am dragging one point of the box out to the far left.

Another little note: If you performed a search to find something you wanted to map, but it ended up returning a bunch of results and you have already saved the place you wanted to your personal map, you can click “Clear Search Results” link that’s right below the “Search Results” and “My Maps” tab and is hard to see!

Once you have your map created, you can share it with others by simply clicking on the Link to this page link at the top right directly above the map. That will change the URL in the address bar of Internet Explorer, so just copy and paste that link into an email to send it to someone. Enjoy!