Photographic Map solutions for >100 images

[Yvonnede_Jong1]

As part of my primate biogeography research in Africa i have been compiling Primate Photographic Maps (www.wildsolutions.nl, powered by Picasa albums), showing primate images throughout their geographical ranges. Some of the PhotoMaps now count no less than 500 images....and collections are growing. As Picasa is changing the set up of their online albums I am more or less forced to host our geotagged photos elsewere. The story maps of ESRI look great and seem very suitable for our purpose. The fact that the images and their labels can be integrated straight from Picasa saves us a lot of work it seems. Great solution i thought except that the Story Maps can 'only' host 99 images. Understanable of course but now I have to look for other solutions. Is there a way to host between 50-800 images on a story map or can anyone advice what other apps or solutions  are available to host large amounts of (already geotagged) photos on a map? Thank you very much for your help!

[XanderBakker]

If you host the App yourself, you can adjust the maximum number of photo's as described here:

GitHub - Esri/map-tour-storytelling-template-js: The Story Map Tour is ideal when you want to presen...

[XanderBakker]

And you may be interested in this thread: Re: How to add more than 100 sections in  Map Journal  where Gregory L'Azou is providing additional information.

[Yvonnede_Jong1]

Thank you Xander, will certainly look at this!

[Yvonnede_Jong1]

Dear Xander, do you know if i can adjust the Story map i produced on ArcGIS online (see: http://arcg.is/1RWNUnv) in the downloaded version or do i have to start from scratch? The reason why i ask is that with the online version you can easily insert your geotagged Picasa photos of course.... opposed to compiling a CSV file in the downloaded version. Thank you!

Yvonne

[XanderBakker]

Hi Yvonne de Jong , I saw your Story Map and the work you and Thomas are doing and sharing this as a Story Map is great! Thank you for sharing the URL.

Unfortunately, I haven't had the opportunity to play around with Story Maps Apps published on your own server. I wonder what would happen if you would group the primates by country or region (or by "vocal profile") to create smaller groups (< 100) and create a Story Map per group.

If these are placed into a tabbed Story Map Series (as app?), would that work?

I think you would be better of with some expert advise from someone like Gregory L'Azou ...

[GregoryL_Azou · Accepted solution]

+1 on Xander reply, we don't recommend adding that many individual sections in a Journal or points in a Map Tour. You can do it and it's documented but we recommend you try to organize your content a bit differently. For example can you create a couple of Map Tour that cover a specific topic or a location and you include in a parent Map Journal? Another option if you happen to have a lot of images at similar location can be to use some Flickr Albums that you reference in a Tour or Journal, see that blog post Adding Flickr albums to Story Maps | ArcGIS Blog

[RupertEssinger]

One more option for handling larger number of features/places with pictures is our Story Map Shortlist app. This organizes features into tabs, where each tab contains the features/places of a particular type. So the user experience is oriented more to browsing than linear sequence like in the Story Map Tour and Story Map Journal. Note that the Shortlist currently doesn't support directly/easily accessing pictures in online albums, and currently doesn't support displaying images at a large size. We are working on enhancing the Shortlist in both of these areas later this year.

Another option to consider, instead of trying to put everything into one story map, might be to create several story maps, such as a set of Story Map Tours, in which to present your content, and then make a web page or gallery providing access to all those stories. For example if your collection of photos can be divided up some way, you could enable people to select the category they want to view, and then launch a smaller, more manageable story map letting them view that category. You may get some ideas for what this might look like from this set of examples in the Story Maps Gallery, although there's not really a great example of what I have in mind in there.