Story Map Shortlist - Desire for a Zoom to Point Capability & the Limitations of the Bookmarks Bar

[RachelDe_Loza2]

I'm creating a story map shortlist that features public art installations around the city. We don't want to use resources to manipulate the source code and host the application ourselves, so we're working with what's available in this template as-is, which, for now, is limited. 

Ideally, we would love the capability for the user to select an image and be zoomed in to that location on the map, similar to how you can select a zoom extent after the first section of a story map tour.

This is not a current capability though, so our next best solution was to create bookmarks for each point.

However, I have so many bookmarks that it exceeds the bookmarks backdrop length AND there's no scroll bar so you can't even view all of them. I attached an image so you can see what I'm talking about.

I've looked at the JSON, but of course this doesn't allow me to manipulate elements like this. 

Maybe someone else has come across this issue and has a possible solution or work around?

Thanks!

[RupertEssinger · Accepted solution]

Hi Rachel.

Sorry about the issue. Shortlist doesn't have an option to zoom to the location of a specific place, although this is requested enough that we should consider it for a future release. It would be handy to be able to zoom in temporarily on a specific place and then have it automatically zoom back to where you were.

Bookmarks aren't really designed to provide this functionality, which is why we don't elegantly support more than a couple of handfuls of them: bookmarks are really just for letting your readers jump to specific areas, like neighborhoods, to see what's there. Also, if your Shortlist uses the default behavior where zooming to an extent filters the tabs to just show the places in that area, then having bookmarks that zoom very close in on particular places may not be good because that will clear out the tabs of all but the place(s) in that specific area.

If you want people to view your places at a specific close-in zoom scale rather than at a more zoomed out, overview scale, I'd recommend firstly unchecking the option in the Settings > General options tab that makes the tabs restrict the places to those in the current extent. In this way, the tabs will show all the places, irrespective of the Shortlist extent. Then secondly, make the initial/home extent of your Shortlist be zoomed in to your desired zoom level somewhere important in your map. In this way, irrespective of which place your readers choose in your tabs, the map will show them that location zoomed in to the scale you chose. Here's an example of this approach.

Rupert

[RachelDe_Loza]

Thank you for the suggestions Rupert!

This made me think of another simple option: including just two bookmarks, one with a zoomed out extent, and the other for the zoomed in extent.

I'll be bringing all these ideas to my client and hopefully we'll have a solution they like

Thanks again!