Shortlist Storymap has deleted most of my content

[PriscillaMollard]

I have been working for days on a story map. I have 3 tabs with 22 locations and their associated thumbnails and text descriptions. Suddenly 2 out of my 3 tabs were empty. The "My Story" page still listed all 22 and it still had the thumbnail titles and links for my images, all of which loaded the correct images when I clicked on them. I took a screenshot of that page and closed it. When I re-opened the story maps website and navigated back to "My Story" it showed that I had 8 locations. All the rest of my locations and associated content are now gone. At no point did I go into any other tab and delete content. When the deletions in tabs 2 and 3 occurred, I was working in tab 1.

[RupertEssinger]

Hi Ian

Thanks for the note and sorry about the lost places. I prefer not to use the term "user error"  especially with something like this that isn't that clear and that has tripped a few people up with Story Map Tour and Story Map Shortlist.

Those apps store their underlying data in a web map and so this can lead to issues if you are working on the map in a separate tab or browser window while also working in the builder for your story, This can cause overwrites like you describe as there's not a item locking or multi-session mechanism on the map. It is a bit tricky because if you want to add additional layers into your Tour or Shortlist map you have to do that via the ArcGIS map viewer outside of the builder. It works OK but be sure to close your builder session first before tackling the web map update. And if you've got a lot of time invested in places you've added, you could also save a copy of the underlying web map used by your Shortlist in order to make a backup, using the Save As option in the ArcGIS map viewer.

One workflow you may know about which may be good if you are worried about losing your places again is to define your Shortlist content outside of the builder as a GIS data layer, for example as a layer based on a spreadsheet, You can then create a Shortlist using the 'as-is' workflow in which the Shortlist displays the places defined in that layer 'as-is' without allowing you to edit them in the builder. In that workflow, you manage your places by editing the layer in your map, or replacing the layer with an updated one, and when you work in the builder (for example to define the colors for the tab defined in your layer), the Shortlist doesn't write anything into the map or update it. It is a handy workflow if you want to display existing GIS features as Shortlist places or you prefer managing your places as GIS data or in a spreadsheet. The one gotcha with this workflow is that your pictures have to be referenced via URLs you store as attribute data for each place, so it works best if your pics are already online or you are able to put them onto a web server, and in this case you should be aware of the recommended sizes for those pics because we don't optimize images referenced via URLs like we do with images you upload or access from Flickr.

Rupert