topic Re: What is best location for Map Tour images? in Classic Esri Story Maps Questions

What is best location for Map Tour images?

PatrickMcKinney1 — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 17:00:07 GMT

I have been deploying self-hosted Map Tours (storymaps). Does anyone know if there would be any performance benefits to hosting the image URLs referenced in the map tour within the same directory as the application? (i.e., resources/images/).

Also, does anyone have any recommendations for an optimized file size for faster image loading?

Thanks,

Patrick

Re: What is best location for Map Tour images?

AdrianWelsh — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 17:05:30 GMT

Have you tried using an external hosting site like Flickr.com? I feel a little more comfortable with those since I know that my pictures will be there and Flickr has 1 Terabyte of free space for you to use as well. They may even be faster to load vs. esri's site. Though, I have not tested performances between the two.

Re: What is best location for Map Tour images?

JenniferPsillas — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 17:15:54 GMT

I use Flickr for my Story Maps, too. But, similarly, I haven't compared performances either.

Re: What is best location for Map Tour images?

AjitkumarBabar — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 17:17:50 GMT

I have used facebook to store images in the past and it worked fine.

Re: What is best location for Map Tour images?

RupertEssinger — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 18:28:07 GMT

If you are self-hosting the images, image size is an important performance concern. We sometimes see map tours with images (either self-hosted or accessed from a third party website) that are very large and slow things down.

We recommend JPG files with the ideal size for the main image 1000 x 750 pixels (which is also the best aspect ratio for the Tour) and the thumbnails 200 x 133 pixels. I also think tours look significantly better if all the main images are the same size. For example see: http://storymaps.esri.com/stories/maptour-palmsprings/ which uses those image file specs throughout.

Rupert