If I have a very large number of geolocated images I want to share with the world; is StoryMap my best option?

Question

I have a very large number of images I'd like to share. I previously used StoryMap to share over seven thousand images and according to the general blurb there are no limits to file sizes as it's all in the cloud. I wondered, however, whether there are actually any practical limits to the number of images you can have in terms of processing and refresh rates?

Thanks

RupertEssinger · Answer

Hi Simon

That's a nice looking use of Story Map Basic to present a lot of photos.

For this kind of app, it would also be worth looking at the Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS: Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS | ArcGIS  which may have some widgets for filtering and presenting large numbers of point features.

Rupert

SimonCrutchley · Answer

Hi Rupert,

Thanks for that. You can see the original StoryMap setup for the 300th anniversary of the birth of the English landscape designer Capability Brown I used at Capability Brown Aerial Photos | Historic England .

The idea is to expand this to enable access to a much wider range of photographs from within the Historic England archive. Does that help?

RupertEssinger · Answer

Hi, the 'place' based Story Map apps that display images side-by-side with and linked to a map aren't really designed to handle a very large number of images. The average Story Map Tour has probably 30 places (and maxes out at 99 unless you customize the app, the average Story Map Shortlist probably 80 or so divided divided into tabs, and Story Map Crowdsource a few hundred. You wouldn't want to try and put thousands of images in these place-based apps both for performance reasons and also because their user interface is browse- rather than search-based. Here's a Story Map Crowdsource that was prepopulated with more than 1000 historic Japanese postcard images: https://ej.maps.arcgis.com/apps/StoryMapCrowdsource/index.html?appid=3625639d89454282b44c7eb899fc910f .

If you have a web map with a layer containing several thousand points, each of which can be clicked to display a popup that includes an image, you could include that web map in one of our 'narrative' based apps, like Story Map Journal, Map  Series, or Cascade. If you use another one of the configurable apps in ArcGIS to publish that web map, you could also embed that app into a narrative-based Story Map app to combine it with text and other multimedia. In both of those cases, the Story Map app is simply displaying a web map or other app, so the performance should pretty much be the same as viewing that map or app outside of the Story Map.

Hope that helps. Perhaps tell us more about what your specific application is.

Rupert