Skip to main content

How to use your own icons in Google My Maps

This article shows how to use your own icons to label places in maps that you make with the My Maps' feature in  Google Maps.


My Maps is a tool provided by Google Maps that lets you make a map showing a specific collection of places.

Why is this helpful?   Well, you can search for a collection of places in regular Google Maps, and share the maps you can see - but if you do this, other people will see different places that are marked on the version of the maps that Google shows them, not the same as the places that are marked for you.    To guarantee what set of places other people see, you need to make a map in My Maps, and then you can share this specific map.

My Maps provides a standard set of icons that can be used for labelling places - and these days it's a pretty impressive standard set.   But it still doesn't include numbers, letters or other labels - and the icons provided may not be styled the way you would like.

Luckily Google have provided a way for you to use any icon to label points on a map you make.


How to use your own custom icon in a My Maps map

Make your map, and add the place(s) you would like to attach a custom icon to.

In the bar on the left hand side, hover your mouse over a place-marker which you want to assign a specific icon to.   

The line for that item will highlight slightly, and a small colour / paint-tipping icon appear will to the right of the place description, like this:




Click on the paint-tipping / colour icon

This opens a small hover-window, where you can choose the colour or icon shape.



Click the button at the bottom labelled More Icons.

On the pop-up that opens, you are able to select an icon from one of the categories available (currently Business, Crisis, Facilities and services, Points of interest, Recreational Activities, Transport, and  Weather).   Don't select any of these.



Instead, at the bottom of the screen, enter in the URL (ie website address) of a  file that you want to use as a marker.  (.jpg  .png  .bmp, and .gif   files can all be used).

Click Add Icon.

This adds the picture that you linked to the list of items available under Custom Icons, and selects it.



Click Ok to apply this icon to the point-marker that is being edited.



Job done!   Your map now has a marker that is made from your own image.



Things to be aware of / Troubleshooting

  • You need to load the image file to a file-host which handles picture files yourself:   there is no option to load a file directly from the More Icons tab.
  • The image file needs to stay, unchanged, in the place where you linked to - and that place has to be available to anyone who might look at the map: if you are sharing the map with "anyone in the world" then the markers need to be available like that, too.
  • The image file should be small to speed up loading time:   images in the set of markers I use are approx 2k each.
  • Markers will be displayed in the same small size as Google's markers, ie 32x32 pixels:   there's no point using a large, detailed photograph if it will shrunk down to so tiny that the details can't be seen.
  • You must provide the actual URL of the picture you want to use as a marker, not the Google Photos shareable link.   (Because the latter includes more than just the photo).
  • I don't know any way to bulk-load many custom icons into a My Maps map at the same time.   (There was a way to do this in the old Google Custom Maps, but this doesn't work in My Maps.)    Or to make one icon available to many / all your your My Maps at once.   If you have a solution for this, please leave a comment below.
  • If you your icon background to be transparent, then you need to create it in RGB colour mode: Icons with a transparent background created in Indexed colour mode don't work.


Related Articles

File hosts:  places used to store pictures used in Blogger

Hosting pictures outside of Google Photos / Picasa Web Albums

How to get shareable links to Google Photos
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Share or Leave Your Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Putting files into Blogger's root directory

This article explains the issues, and options, for putting a file into the "root directory" of your Blogger blog. Turnips (Brassica rapa)  from Wikimedia commons Originally posted to Flickr   by thebittenword.com.   Licensed under the terms of  the cc-by-2.0. If you are using certain non-Google products to enhance your Blog, they will sometimes tell you to put a file into your root-directory .   They may even tell you to use an FTP  tool to do this. Sometimes this happens when a product also gives you code to install into your blog  , This approach is used when the code is written for websites in general rather than specifically to work with Blogger: putting useful files into a place relative to the root directory makes it a lot easier to move a website from a test-address to the live one, so is a common approach outside of Blogger. Or maybe the other tool has been designed to verify that you do own the website in this way, rather than asking...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to share pictures from Google Photos, using shareable-links

This article describes how to get a link to one ore more photos from your Google Photos collection, using the Shareable Link controls.   It also explains how to delete shareable links that you have made in the past Google Photos is a tool for managing picture collections. It replaces Google+ Photos, and works alongside Picasa-web-albums.   You can read more about it here . Shareable Links are a new type of linking introduced in Google Photos, which let you easily share one or more pictures at the same time.   You can email them, or use them in tools like Facebook. When someone opens a shareable link, they see a display with the date, the name and picture of the person who is logged in to Google at the time, and all the pictures that are included in the same shareable link. If you want to use an image from Google Photos in a tool which cannot use shareable links, you need to find the URL for the photo, instead. How to get the shareable link for one photo in Google Pho...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to change or remove the Newer Post and Older Posts links

This article explains how to hide or change the format of the "Older Posts" and "Newer Post" and "Home" links that are shown at the b ottom of Blogger blogs with Layout or Designer templates. Why are the older and newer posts links used Most designer and layout templates have links at the bottom of your page of blog posts which let readers navigate back and forward among the list of posts. This is basic to how a blog is intended to work:  you post regularly, and give people a way to get back to previous posts. The pager-links are particularly important on pages that are reached using the Label or Archive gadgets, which may show more posts than you normally have on your home page, or displaying in your blog. But some people want to remove them - and this is fine provided readers have other ways of navigating around the blog. How to remove "Newer Posts" and "Older Posts" from your blog To totally remove these items, you just add some new...
Post a Comment
Read more