The classic Esri Story Maps templates are scheduled to be retired in early 2026. For more information and resources about the retirement, see the Classic Esri Story Maps Roadmap for Retirement.
If you are looking to preserve one or more of your most popular Shortlist stories, you can use the simple process outlined below to migrate a Shortlist layer to a hosted feature layer that can be immediately used in ArcGIS StoryMaps.
Note: After the classic templates are retired, you will be unable to view existing classic stories using their arcgis.com URLs. However, your classic story content items, such as the web maps that contain the data for classic Shortlist stories, will remain. This means you can migrate your classic stories to ArcGIS StoryMaps even after the retirement date has passed.
Convert the Shortlist layer into a feature layer
The first part of this process involves finding the Shortlist layer and converting it to a hosted feature layer. Here’s are the steps to follow to do this:
- Go to your ArcGIS Content page.
- Find a web map that contains a Shortlist layer and open its item page. The web map typically has the same name as the Shortlist web mapping application item.
- On the web map's item page, click Open in Classic Map Viewer
- Find the Shortlist layer in the layer list and click ... then Save layer.
- Go back to your ArcGIS Content page and open the item page for the new feature layer you created in the previous step.
- On the feature layer item page, click Publish.
This workflow currently requires the classic map viewer, which is also scheduled to be retired in early 2026. The new map viewer will be updated with this capability in an upcoming release. When that occurs, we will look to update this blog.
Create the map tour
Once you’ve created the feature layer, you can create a map tour in a new story or any existing story.
- Go to ArcGIS StoryMaps and create a new story (or edit an existing story where you want to add the new categorized tour).
- Click the green (+) button, select Map Tour, then Start with a feature layer, and then the hosted feature service layer you created in the previous steps.
- Finally, configure the map tour as needed.
You can change the tour to use the Categorized layout, if needed, and select fields to display the information fields you want in the tour and categorize the places. See the resource links below for more info about the available options and tips.
More resources
Here are some more resources for learning more about map tours.
Looking to migrate other types of classic stories?
