Creating a Map in Google Maps

Video Transcript

"MAN: So now, I'll show you how to actually create your own map using My Maps. So first, you want to just make sure you're signed in to your Google account and then you want to click the My Maps tab then create a new map. And then you can add a title and description for your map. You don't have to but if you want to. And then you have your privacy settings. Public allows anybody to see it if they search for it in the map results. Unlisted means it's private. And even though it's unlisted, I will be able to send my friends and family a link to it. So I'm just going to leave it unlisted. And now, I'm editing the map and I got these new options right here to add a place mark, draw a line and draw a shape. First of all, I'll show you how the place marks work. It's just like Google's search results. It's a little place marker. And if I just click, I set it down, and then I can add my title and description. And you've got these options right here for plain text, but one of the coolest things is writing in rich text here. And that just means that you can do things like bold it, underline it, change the font. I'm sure, it's pretty obvious. And you can even hyperlink it to a Web page if you have the URL. And you can add a picture if you have the URL. So for this to work, you need the URL. And if you use like a photo sharing service like Google's Picasa or Photobucket, you can get that from there. And you can also edit the HTML if you want. And at this point, I could paste in even like imbedded videos from like places like Expert Village and YouTube. I could paste that in and the video would imbed in there. So that's how a place maker works. If I ever wanted to move it around, I just click and drag it. The next tool is the line tool. And just like it sounds, I just click and then I can click again. If I just keep drawing this line I can make a path on my map. And I double-click when I'm done and then I get the title, description, rich text options again and enter all this in. The next option is to draw a shape. It's very similar to the line, but you're just going to--just like you were with the line, just click to add a point, and when you get done, you go back to your original box, and there's your shape. And then again, you can enter the description or pictures or whatever you want. And then you just keep doing this and that's how you create your own map. Another way to add things to your map is if you search for something you can see the results right here. And I'm still looking at My Map as you can see, but if I click on my search results right here, I can do save to My Maps. And then it gives you actually which map you want to save it to. If I have multiple maps, it'll all be here, but I only have created one. So I'll save it, and there it is. And I can add my own descriptions if I want and add my own pictures using the same options I've already showed you. So that's pretty cool. And I mean this is just really useful if you want to make your own map and put your pictures from around town or something like that. Or one thing I even use it for, when I was looking for an apartment one time, I would search for the apartment in Google Maps and then I would add it to My Map, so then I could just go to My Map to look at all the apartments I was interested in. So there are just tons of different things you could do with this and just a really cool feature in Google Maps, and you can have a lot of fun. It's very useful for some things. One more thing about when you're creating a map, you can save right here. You can see it's saved. But if I edited something, I did that. It's not saved so I want to save it. And then when I'm done, I'll just click done, and then you can see if I want to go back to edit, I'll just click right here. And I can turn the map off by clicking right there. Turn it on. And now that I'm not editing, I can see everything the way it's supposed to be seen. There's the location I added from the search. There's the thing I added with the rich text in my box and my line. So that's how you create your own map in the My Maps feature in Google Maps."