Creating Map Images

Alec Ramsay
Dave’s Redistricting
2 min readFeb 11, 2021

You can download the image of a map as you see it in DRA 2020, i.e., with all the color, line, and label settings active and without an on-screen visual artifacts.

An as-you-see-it map image

You can, of course, take screenshots of a (partial) map in Map view, but you need to be mindful of on-screen visual artifacts. You typically want to crop them out of the image that you share, so you have to make the image that you want to share only as big as a rectangle that fits within the on-screen controls.

A partial map image with on-screen visual artifacts

To get the image of the entire Map view as you currently see it and without the on-screen visual artifacts, just right-click on the map using Chrome as your browser. A context menu will come up that lets you download or copy the image in PNG format.

As in the first image above, the resulting image will look exactly like what you see in Map view, just without the on-screen visual controls.

Exporting Maps

One of the many formats the Export command lets you choose to export to is a PNG (see Exporting Maps). That option always produces an image of the entire map and it does not include labels (both regardless of what Map view looks like). That image is the thumbnail used in the list of maps.

The map image produced using Export

Sharing & Publishing Maps

In addition to sharing images of maps, you can also share links to the maps directly (see Share & Publish Maps).

--

--

Alec Ramsay
Dave’s Redistricting

I synthesize large complex domains into easy-to-understand conceptual frameworks: I create simple maps of complex territories.