Latest Contributions by RupertEssinger

Hi Barb Yes your ArcMap MXD map can be imported into a story map, but not directly as a file. Story Maps are ArcGIS Online (and Portal for ArcGIS) application templates that display content in web maps, so you first have to publish the map data in your MXD from ArcMap either into ArcGIS Online (Esri's cloud), your enterprise's Portal, or your enterprise's Server. (It depends how ArcGIS is deployed where you work). That process gets your data online. In ArcMap, choose File > Share As > Service in the wizard that appears choose the option to Publish a Service. You can also do this from ArcGIS Pro. It's rather easier in Pro because after you have opened your MXD file up in Pro you can right-click the specific layer you want to publish and choose Share As Web Layer. In both apps it is pretty neat because it automatically looks at your data and tells you if there are any issues or choices to make about publishing it online. Now your data is online, the next step is to add it into a web map, either a new web map or an existing one you've already made. After you've authored your web map you are ready to put it to work in an app such as a story map app. For example in the Share dialog in the ArcGIS Online Map UI, you'll see the option to share your web map as an application, and a little gallery of the apps you can use appears, including story map apps. You can also go directly to the Story Maps website and launch our Story Map builders directly. There are a couple of lower tech ways to get data from your MXD into a web map.  These don't involve publishing your data as services and can be performed with any ArcGIS Online account level. You can take a shapefile created in ArcMap or ArcGIS Pro, zip it up into a zip file, and then upload that file directly into a web map. This supports up to 1000 features per shapefile. That's all you need for many simple datasets. Unlike publishing a service, using a shapefile doesn't carry any of the layer symbology or other properties (like scale visibility) over into the web map, so you have to define all the styling and layer properties in the web map, but the new smart mapping options make that easy. You can also upload CSV files and TXT files into web maps (if they have lat/longs or street addresses) to define point layers (i.e one point per row in the table). The main reason to do that rather just upload your points as a shapefile is if you have long descriptive text about the points in your ArcMap layer and you don't want that field(s) to be truncated down to 254 characters (which is the limit shapefiles impose). ... View more

Rickey is correct. By default, if use pictures in a Shortlist that are larger than 280 x 210 pixels width/height, it will scale them down to fit into the Shortlist popup nicely. That's why we recommend ideally using pictures that size and shape. (You don't need to resize your pictures down to that size because the Shortlist does that for you so they fit, but if you use very large pictures it can slow down the initial load time of your Shortlist because those pictures are also displayed in the tabs). If you want the Shortlist to display larger images in the popup or details panel, you would need to customize the code. I found a few examples of this: http://maps.nashville.gov/LID_Sites/ http://mediamaps.esri.com/geography-of-horror/ http://www.iau-idf.fr/urbaviz/shortlist/ http://www.nps.gov/gis/storymaps/shortlist/v2/?appid=963b3a1ab77e4e4bb20660f7dab8b3cd (in this example clicking on the picture in the popup display a fullsize version of it). We want to improve how Shortlist handles pictures because everyone likes great pictures and by default they are quite small in Shortlist. So in a future release we would like to support larger image display. ... View more

Hi Chaya Assuming you have one point layer in your web map for each tab in your Shortlist you can simply change the drawing order of your point layers in your web map (i.e. move them up and down in the Contents panel in the ArcGIS Online map viewer) and that change will be reflected in your Shortlist. If you are using the option in the most recent Shortlist release (1.4, June 2015) to use a single layer (with a Tab_name field) to define all the tabs in your Shortlist, the tab order is defined by the order in which the different names in your layer's Tab_Name field appear in your layer. However you can change this order without editing the layer by using the TAB_ORDER variable in the Index,html file as explained in the Shortlist Readme PDF doc. In the most recent Shortlist release (1.4) the order in which your places are listed in each tab is defined by default by the record order in which they appear in your layer.  So for example if you use CSV file to define your points, then the order will be the order in which the places are listed in the file. So if you don't like the order you can change it by editing the file or sorting the records in Excel. If you are using a shapefile or feature class you can edit or sort your features in ArcGIS for Desktop to change the order. Alternatively you also have the option to manually specify the order by including a Number field in your layer, and then using that to assign the number you want to each place. When a number field is present, the Shortlist will use that to number the places. Prior to Shortlist 1.4, the Number field was required and was always used to define the place order. ... View more

Thanks Keith, and thanks for bringing that to our attention. I've not seen that issue before when editing feature collections but I use Chrome mostly. Your Shortlist looks good. You may want to look at our recent Story Map Shortlist release (1.4.3): it has some enhancements that might be useful for this kind of story map project where the content is dynamic (as commercial properties become available and then get sold): - It now supports the use of ArcGIS Online feature services, so you can update and maintain your Shortlist by publishing and editing services instead of having to edit feature collections in the web map. This is more flexible for data driven story maps as it gives you more options for editing. - You now have the option to define all your Shortlist tabs using a single layer. That layer contains a field which defines the tab you want each place to be listed under. This also makes it easier to pour databases into Shortlists. Using one layer per tab is still supported but may not be convenient if your source data is a single layer or dataset. - The Shortlist will now automatically number the places in each tab. Previously if you added a new place you would have to manually renumber the remaining places. Now it uses the record order in the layer to auto-number the places. Manual numbering is still supported, so we respect the Number field if present otherwise we auto-number. For more info, please see: Story Map Shortlist app template updated ... View more