topic Re: Overlapping shapes in ArcGIS Online Questions

Overlapping shapes

AndyKubrin — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 22:28:55 GMT

I'm working on a map that displays water monitoring sites. Some of the water are so close together that the shapes used to mark the sites overlap at the default zoom, which displays all water monitoring sites.

If I zoom in enough to avoid overlap, many of the sites are no longer visible in the display.

I've reduced the shapes to 24 px, but that does not eliminate overlap. Is there a better solution? Stickpins, perhaps?

Link to the map

Re: Overlapping shapes

DavidSolari — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 22:58:57 GMT

A few suggestions:

Add some transparency to the symbols so you can see overlaps and get accurate counts
Use symbols that are offset from the center, like those pushpins you suggested or a crescent moon or something. This makes it easier to see overlaps while keeping a natural appearance
Play around with Clustering. This isn't a magic bullet as it can cause issues with some apps and the special aggregate popups but it's a surefire way to avoid overlaps.

Re: Overlapping shapes

RussRoberts — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 13:19:29 GMT

It looks like these are all separate map notes layers for each feature in Map Viewer Classic. If you can merge them together then you could have it as a hosted feature layer where you could do clustering or binning on the features and once the viewers pass a scale level they can see the individual features. You could also set drawing order to be based on a priority field or if you are using the types style you can use the order set there to drive how things are displayed over one another.