From the history of map creation. What is shown on the map? Rail route maps

It is impossible to determine when a person made the first map. It is only known that many millennia BC, man already knew the area around him well and knew how to depict it on sand or tree bark. These cartographic images served to indicate migration routes, hunting places, etc.

As the economy and cultural needs of people developed, their horizons expanded. Many more hundreds of years passed. People, in addition to hunting and fishing, began to engage in cattle breeding and agriculture. This new, higher level of culture was reflected in the drawings and plans. They become more detailed, more expressive, and more accurately convey the character of the area.

One of the oldest images of a hunting ground in the North Caucasus has survived to this day. It is engraved on silver approximately 3 thousand years BC. e., i.e. about 5 thousand years ago. The picture shows a lake and rivers flowing into it, flowing from a mountain range. Animals that lived in those days on the slopes of the Caucasus Mountains or in the valleys are also depicted.

This most valuable cultural monument of the ancient inhabitants of our country was found by scientists during excavations of one of the mounds on the bank of the river. Kuban near the city of Maykop.

Under the slave system in the ancient world, the compilation of geographical maps reached great development. The Greeks established the sphericity of the Earth and its dimensions, introduced cartographic projections, meridians and parallels into science.

One of the most famous scientists of the ancient world, geographer and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, who lived in Alexandria (at the mouth of the Nile River) in the 2nd century, compiled a detailed map of the Earth, which no one had ever created before.

This map depicts three parts of the world - Europe, Asia and Libya (as Africa was then called), as well as the Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean and other seas. The map already has a degree grid. Ptolemy introduced this grid to more correctly depict the spherical shape of the Earth on the map. The rivers, lakes, peninsulas of Europe and North Africa known at that time are shown quite accurately on Ptolemy’s map.

If you compare Ptolemy’s map with a modern one, it is easy to notice that areas located far from the Mediterranean Sea region, that is, known to Ptolemy only by rumor, received fantastic outlines.

What is especially striking is that Asia is not depicted in its entirety. Ptolemy did not know where it ended in the north and east. He also did not know about the existence of the Arctic and Pacific oceans. Africa continues on the map to the South Pole and turns into some kind of land connecting to Asia in the east. Ptolemy did not know that Africa ends in the south and is washed by the ocean. He also did not know about the existence of independent continents - America, Antarctica and Australia. Ptolemy depicted the Indian Ocean as a closed sea, into which it was impossible to sail on ships from Europe. And yet, in the ancient world and in subsequent centuries, until the 15th century, no one made a better map of the world than Ptolemy.

Ancient Egyptian map of gold mines, the so-called Turin papyrus. The map is a combination of a plan drawing and a profile one. This is a cartographic technique used until the 18th century. Mountains are shown in profile. The plan shows: a gold-bearing vein; a temple consisting of two halls and adjoining rooms; settlement of mine workers; ore washing basin.

The Romans made extensive use of maps for administrative and military purposes; they drew up road maps.

During the Middle Ages, the achievements of ancient science were forgotten for a long time. The Church entered into a fierce struggle with scientific ideas about the structure and origin of the world.

In schools, fables were taught about the creation of the world by God in six days, about the global flood, about heaven and hell. The idea that the Earth was spherical was considered “heretical” by churchmen and was strictly persecuted. The idea of ​​the Earth took on a completely fantastic form. In the VI century. The Byzantine merchant - monk Cosmas Indicoplov depicted the Earth in the shape of a rectangle.

The main type of maps is becoming rough, far from reality and devoid of a scientific basis, “monastery maps”. They indicate the decline of cartography in medieval Europe. During this period, many small closed states arose in Europe. With a subsistence economy, these feudal states did not need connections with the outside world.

By the end of the Middle Ages, trade and navigation began to develop in European cities, and art and science began to flourish.

In the XIII-XIV centuries. In Europe, a compass and marine navigation charts, the so-called portolans, appeared.

These maps depicted the coastline in detail and very accurately, while the interior parts of the continents remained empty or were filled with pictures from the life of the peoples inhabiting them.

The era of great geographical discoveries created the conditions for the rise of cartographic science: sailors needed a good, truthful geographical map. In the 16th century more correct maps appeared, built in new cartographic projections.

If you find an error, please highlight a piece of text and click Ctrl+Enter.

Geographic map- this is a reduced image of the earth's surface on a plane using conventional symbols. The map is the greatest invention of mankind. Geographic maps depict entire states, and sometimes several states, and even the entire globe.

Man has always needed plans and maps. They appeared much earlier than the first letters, the first hieroglyphs. They have come a long way from drawings to accurate, mathematically verified models of areas of the earth's surface. Maps are constantly updated, because the appearance of the Earth is constantly changing: river flows change, glaciers advance and retreat, geographic objects created by man appear. In the 20th century, people saw the Earth from airplanes and spaceships. Knowledge about the Earth has increased, and the possibilities for creating maps have expanded.

The first geographical maps

The first geographical maps appeared in the Stone Age. In ancient times, the Earth seemed huge to people. They gradually got to know her during their travels. A journey is a hike or voyage during which people, having left their native places, visit new lands.

The motorist takes with him road map. Tourists need it when traveling local map, along which they have to go. Maps are needed by geologists, builders, ship captains, and the military. A map of treasure island, accidentally discovered in a pirate's chest, became the beginning of an adventure novel...

A brief physical and geographical description can be given using only two maps: physical card hemispheres and natural areas globe. These maps are not very detailed. They do not have the names of many mountains, plateaus, lowlands, seas, bays, straits, rivers, lakes, etc. But with more detailed maps, the characteristics of any part of the world or a separate part of the continent can be given much more fully.

There are special cards. Among them - climatic, on which symbols show the average temperatures of July and January, the directions of the prevailing winter and summer winds, the average annual precipitation, the highest and lowest temperatures, the thickness of snow cover in different parts of the globe. There are cards mineral, soil, cards vegetation. On economic-geographical maps it shows where various minerals are mined and processed, what industry is developed in cities, what crops are grown in this or that region of the globe. On political maps Countries are shown in different colors and their capitals are labeled.

Physical card

Historical map

Historical map is an image of the Earth or a large part of the earth's surface at various times in human history. A historical map can indicate battle sites, ancient fortresses, front lines, trade routes, cities, and cultural monuments that date back to a certain time.

The same territory depicted on maps at different times looks different. A historical map helps you see what changes have occurred in a particular area.

The title of a historical map always includes an indication of the time to which it relates. For example, “Ancient Egypt”, “Europe of the 15th century”, “Formation of the Old Russian state (IX-X centuries)”.

A historical map allows you to answer the question of where the event took place. There are rules that you need to remember when starting to work with a historical map.

Historical plan

Contour maps for history

Contour maps of history show only the outlines of territories at one time or another. On them you can see lines indicating rivers, seas, and the location of cities marked with dots. This is the basis. The names of objects are applied to the contour map in the process of studying historical events.

Geographical atlas

Different cards collected together in the form of an album are called geographical atlas.

globe

Image on the map

Methods of cartographic representation

Scale

The scale of the maps is small. After all, the Earth is large, and in order to show its entire surface or one continent on a map, the image on the map has to be reduced millions of times. For example, a map scale of 1: 10,000,000 (“1 cm is 100 km”) means that all distances on the map are reduced by ten million times. 2 cm on the map corresponds to two hundred kilometers on the ground, and so on. The scale of maps of the entire Earth or individual continents is very small: for example, 1: 50,000,000, i.e. 1 cm is 500 km. It is clear that such maps can only show the main geographical objects - mountains and plains, large rivers, islands.

The smaller the territory shown on the map, the larger and more detailed it can be shown. The territory of any one country, one region is often called a region - for example, the region of the Mediterranean Sea, can be shown in more detail. For this purpose, maps are made at larger scales, for example 1: 5,000,000, i.e. in 1 cm 50 km, 1: 1,000,000, i.e. 1 cm is 10 km. On such maps you can show not only the main rivers, but also their tributaries, not only seas, but also bays. In different cases, it is convenient to use maps of different scales, which show the whole world, a separate continent or region.

Legend

Map makers must reduce the image of the Earth and its large parts many times to fit on a sheet of paper. Many objects on the map are indicated by symbols (figures, arrows, lines). Their explanations are given in the section “Conventions”. The map is painted in different colors and contains inscriptions. The list (set) of symbols and explanations used on the map is called map legend.

Conditional lines

The maps depict conventional lines: poles, equator lines and degree grids (meridians and parallels).

Equator

At an equal distance from the poles, a line encircles the globe on globes and maps equator. The length of the equator is 40,000 km.

Degree grid

Since the Earth is a sphere, all distances on its surface can be measured in degrees of circumference. Lines of meridians and parallels divided into degrees are called degree grid. Using a degree grid, you can determine the geographic location of any point on the Earth's surface.

  • Meridians- these are lines that cross the globe from pole to pole.
  • Parallels- these are lines that go around the globe parallel to the equator.

Date line

Isohypses (horizontals)

On the maps, territories with close absolute altitudes are painted the same color. Individual relief forms are not depicted on them. It is impossible to show them on a small scale. Only individual mountain peaks and deep depressions are marked with dots, near which their height or depth is indicated.

On some large-scale maps, relief is shown, as on a plan, using contour lines. On other maps you can see the relief image using a “shading”. In this case, the picture of mountains and valleys becomes very clear, but determining their height is difficult.

Map projection

“Exploring an unfamiliar land always begins with a map... You can wander on a map in the same way as on land, but then, when you get to this real land, knowledge of the map immediately affects you - you no longer wander blindly and don’t waste time on trifles.” , - these are the words of the writer Konstantin Paustovsky.

They read the map in the same way as a book, they think about it. She answers many questions, poses new ones and helps answer them. Why do rivers flow this way, where is it better to build a seaport or lay a railway? These and other problems can be solved only by carefully studying the map. Knowing how to read a map, you can learn about what peoples inhabit the Earth, what natural conditions they live in, how the economy is developed in different countries, and much more. Everyone should learn to read and understand a map, because without knowledge of a map there is no

Travel technologies. Maps of countries and routes May 26th, 2013

People are vain. Bloggers are even more vain. They are measured by places in the top, social capital and other attributes of success in virtual life. Well, travel bloggers are triply vain. They have the opportunity to compete in the number of countries and cities visited, in kilometers of routes and flights. Fortunately, the Internet is full of all kinds of services that allow you to visualize and count your tourism achievements. The main such tool is travel maps. I do not set out to review sites and programs that allow you to map your travels. There are a lot of them. I’ll only tell you about those that I use myself.


Although I am not a blogger or a traveler, curiosity and vanity are not alien to me. I also try to keep travel statistics and maps are my favorite tool for this.

In this post, I will limit myself to post-facto travel mapping (mapping routes that have already been taken). Maps used online during trips (both paper and electronic), navigation and construction of routes online are a topic for a separate discussion.

Maps of countries visited

The most global map available to a tourist or traveler, unless of course he has gone to Mars, is a map of visited countries. Such a map usually also serves as a counter, indicating the number of countries.

You can find at least a dozen sites that allow you to create such a map interactively and provide a code to insert into your page, for example, in LiveJournal.

They differ in ease of use, graphics and, most importantly, in their approach to the number of countries. Some consider only officially recognized independent states, some include territories with a special status (for example, Hong Kong and Macau), while others cannot find some little-known countries like my beloved Kiribati.

I use the very first service that appeared on the Internet (http://douweosinga.com), which generates the simplest graphical map (1):

This service only counts “official” countries, of which I have accumulated 61.

Another version of the map - from http://bighugelabs.com - looks good, but adds Hong Kong, Macau and the Åland Islands (2):

The cutest in terms of graphics, but not the most convenient for inserting into your website, is the map from http://www.ammap.com/ (3):

Maps of visited regions by country

This type of map allows you to shade visited regions on a world or country map. This makes sense, first of all, for large countries with a federal structure, which is why such services are available for the USA, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and Russia.

For Russia, such maps can be built using at least two services - www.visited.ru and http://xtalk.msk.su/rusmap/.

Maps of visited places and cities

Some services allow you to combine countries visited and places visited. True, the choice of locations remains the privilege of the service’s authors and is not always clear.

RunKeeper draws routes in GoogleMaps and saves them on its website in the user's account.

Here, for example, is a map of a 12-kilometer walk in Riga from RunKeeper with additional information (time, pace, calories, terrain and pace chart) (15):

And this is GPS tracking of a 16 km long walk through San Francisco (16):

The only big drawback of RunKeeper is its buggy nature. During long routes, it often freezes and does not allow you to record the entire route. However, this may not be due to the application, but to its carrier.

Rail route maps

I have not found a suitable service for these purposes. I built a map of my railway routes in Google Maps Engine, without worrying too much about the accuracy of the railway display. On a small scale it looks like this (17):

Air travel maps and databases

Here, unlike the railway, there are several good services that allow you to maintain a database of air travel and display them on the map. I use Flight Memory (http://www.flightmemory.com) and Open Flights (http://openflights.org/). One of them is better suited for maintaining a flight database, and the other is better at building maps. Luckily, Flight Memory data can be imported into Open Flights.

Both services allow you to maintain a database of air travel and generate a lot of interesting statistics and flight maps.

Here, for example, are my general flight statistics for 2010-2012 (I was too lazy to enter earlier flights) from Flight Memory (18):

And here are the statistics on airports, airlines, aircraft, routes (19):

Flight Memory generates separate maps for domestic and international flights, which in my opinion is inconvenient. This is what my map of international flights for 2010-12 looks like from Flight Memory (20):

The map from Open Flights seems to me to be better in terms of graphics and it does not divide flights into domestic and international. My 2012 flight map (21):

Questions

With all the variety of services for creating route and travel maps, there are no ideal tools. In this regard, several questions remain.

Are there any universal services for maintaining travel statistics with routes and maps - similar to Flight Memory, but for any type of travel?

Are there specialized services for building routes by rail and sea?

Well, I will be glad to any advice on the topic.

Good luck satisfying your curiosity and vanity. The cards have been dealt.

People are vain. Bloggers are even more vain. They are measured by places in the top, social capital and other attributes of success in virtual life. Well, travel bloggers are triply vain. They have the opportunity to compete in the number of countries and cities visited, in kilometers of routes and flights. Fortunately, the Internet is full of all kinds of services that allow you to visualize and count your tourism achievements. The main such tool is travel maps. I do not set out to review sites and programs that allow you to map your travels. There are a lot of them. I’ll only tell you about those that I use myself.


Although I am not a blogger or a traveler, curiosity and vanity are not alien to me. I also try to keep travel statistics and maps are my favorite tool for this.

In this post, I will limit myself to post-facto travel mapping (mapping routes that have already been taken). Maps used online during trips (both paper and electronic), navigation and construction of routes online is a topic for a separate discussion.

Maps of countries visited

The most global map available to a tourist or traveler, unless of course he went to Mars, is a map of visited countries. Such a map usually also serves as a counter, indicating the number of countries.

You can find at least a dozen sites that allow you to create such a map interactively and provide a code to insert into your page, for example, in LiveJournal.

They differ in ease of use, graphics and, most importantly, their approach to the number of countries. Some consider only officially recognized independent states, some include territories with a special status (for example, Hong Kong and Macau), while others cannot find some little-known countries like my beloved Kiribati.

I use the very first service that appeared on the Internet (http://douweosinga.com), which generates the simplest graphical map:



This service only counts “official” countries, of which I have accumulated 61.



Maps of visited regions by country

This type of map allows you to shade visited regions on a world or country map. This makes sense, first of all, for large countries with a federal structure, which is why such services are available for the USA, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and Russia.



For Russia, such maps can be built using at least two services - www.visited.ru and http://xtalk.msk.su/rusmap/.



Maps of visited places and cities

Some services allow you to combine countries visited and places visited. True, the choice of locations remains the privilege of the service’s authors and is not always clear.

RunKeeper draws routes in GoogleMaps and saves them on its website in the user's account.

Here, for example, is a map of a 12-kilometer walk in Riga from RunKeeper with additional information (time, pace, calories, terrain and pace chart):


And this is GPS tracking of a 16 km walk through San Francisco:



The only big drawback of RunKeeper is its buggy nature. With long routes, it often freezes and does not allow you to record the entire route. However, this may not be due to the application, but to its carrier.

Rail route maps

I have not found a suitable service for these purposes. I built a map of my railway routes in Google Maps Engine, without worrying too much about the accuracy of the railway display. On a small scale it looks like this:



Air travel maps and databases

Here, unlike the railway, there are several good services that allow you to maintain a database of air travel and display them on the map. I use Flight Memory (http://www.flightmemory.com) and Open Flights (http://openflights.org/). One of them is better suited for maintaining a flight database, and the other is better at building maps. Luckily, Flight Memory data can be imported into Open Flights.

Both services allow you to maintain a database of air travel and generate a lot of interesting statistics and flight maps.

Here, for example, are my general flight statistics for 2010-2012 (I was too lazy to enter earlier flights) from Flight Memory:



And here are the statistics for airports, airlines, planes, routes:



Flight Memory generates separate maps for domestic and international flights, which in my opinion is inconvenient. This is what my map of international flights for 2010-12 looks like from Flight Memory:



The map from Open Flights seems to me to be better in terms of graphics and it does not divide flights into domestic and international. My 2012 flight map (21):



Good luck satisfying your curiosity and vanity. The cards have been dealt.

⇡ Tripline.net

Using this site, you can create exciting interactive videos that show your movements on Google Maps. They look like this: a red line sequentially runs from one point to another, indicating your route. At key points, the movement stops to allow the viewer to read information and watch a slideshow of photographs; all this is accompanied by a musical composition. At any time you can pause viewing, switch to manual mode and change the scale of the surface.

Travel map created with Tripline.net

To create a map, you must log in to the site using your account (registration is only supported through Facebook). After this, you should click the Create a new map button, which is located next to the search line. There are three ways to create a map:

Let's take a closer look at the manual editing option. At the first stage, you need to enter the name of the map, its type (trip, hike, cruise, etc. - more than twenty options in English), the place where you visited (for example, Europe or Africa), privacy settings (personal, for friends, public ) and check other options.

Creating a new map in Tripline.net

The next step is to add the key points that make up the journey. The starting point is your Facebook location and can be edited or deleted. You need to add new places using the add places button - they will be marked on the map with numbers 1, 2, 3, and so on. You can do this in three ways: by searching for settlements on Google Maps, by entering geographic coordinates, and manually by dragging a placemark on the map. However, in the same way you can change the position of points added automatically. For each point, not only the location is indicated, but also the date, time of visit and information such as name, description, personal notes, as well as how to display it in the video: stop at it, drive past or view a slide show. You are free to determine how many points you need to fix in the route - however, it is worth keeping in mind that the service lays straight lines between them, without taking into account either roads or obstacles, and if you want to demonstrate the complexity and tortuosity of the route, you will have to create many points at every turn of the road.

Editing a point on the map in Tripline.net

Before saving the map, you can edit the information about it again and select a melody that will accompany the viewing. Unfortunately, you cannot upload your own sound file - you have to be content with a choice of more than ten standard compositions: African motifs, jazz, indie and others. Adding photos is done after the map has been created by clicking on the camera icon in the point options. You can upload photos from your computer or import them from online albums on Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, and Picasa. Comments are also added to place descriptions.

Adding travel photos to Tripline.net

⇡ Tripster.ru

This is a Russian service whose goal is to help organize independent travel. Here you can find questions and answers from travelers, search for flights and hotels, and in your profile you can mark the cities you have already visited and where you are planning to travel. Registration is carried out in several steps. On the first of them you need to check the boxes next to the cities visited in Russia, Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America. Only the most popular cities are displayed; you can add the rest later.

Registration on Tripster.ru. First step

When you click the “Get card” button, you go to the second step, where you need to enter your profile data - e-mail, page address on the service (type tripster.ru/user), first name, last name and name of your city. After this, you can proceed to bulk adding marks near all visited places: in this mode, a Google Maps map and a list of settlements corresponding to a given scale level are displayed. If the European part of Russia is in the center, then the list will include Moscow, St. Petersburg and others, and if Siberia - then Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk and so on. A regular search using city names also works.

Adding cities to Tripster.ru

The finished travel map can be viewed on your profile, as well as embedded in a blog or personal website. To do this, you need to copy the HTML code of the card in the settings. It displays a section of Google Maps with labels, and above the map there is a plate with approximately the following information: “the user was in 28 cities and 7 countries,” and you can switch to more detailed statistics, including the place and result among all users of the service. In addition, you can embed a button on your website with similar information, but without a map.

Map from Tripster.ru inserted into a post by a LiveJournal user

The service also allows you to mark cities you want to visit and collect various information about upcoming trips. You can use these features to organize future trips.

⇡ Flagatrip.ru

Another Russian service where a large amount of information from travelers is posted. You can mark places visited, post travel reports and plan future events, upload photos and videos, and share reviews. The site has well-developed elements of social networks - you can view the profiles of other users, add friends, and join communities. After completing the registration procedure, you can begin to create your card. To do this, go to your profile and click the “Create and Edit” link.

Creating a trip map on Flagatrip.ru

First, you can add or change your current place of residence and one by one indicate the places where you have been. When you enter a name, they are selected from a list; as elsewhere, the Google Maps cartographic database is used. Please note that adding visited places does not only happen here - they can also be marked when creating reports. Generating a report takes place in several steps. On the first one, you need to select the start and end dates of the trip, mark its type (hitchhiking, trip with children, bicycle, etc.), enter the points of departure and destination, and there may be several of the latter - you can put a tick on them “was passing through”. For each point, you should note the type of transport that was used for movement (they are presented in the form of icons - plane, car, bus, boat, etc.), and at destinations you can also indicate the hotels where you stayed.

Creating a trip report on Flagastrip.ru

On the second step to the report tags are added, and on the third - a description is entered. It includes the title of the report, information about the trip (the visual text editor allows you to highlight the font, insert links, emoticons, photos, videos and tables), individual facts and a folder with relevant photographs. After clicking the “Done!” button a report will be created, and markers of the listed points will appear on your map. You can customize the map size (small, medium, large or custom) and copy the HTML code to embed on your website or LiveJournal, LiveInternet, Blogspot blog. You can also copy the code for the button “I visited so many countries” or “I visited so many places in so many countries.”

User profile Flagatrip.ru

Places you have visited are marked on the map with flags. This is not the only category of objects - in addition to locations, the map may contain icons of hotels, attractions, restaurants, entertainment, events, and active recreation. You can switch between them using the buttons in the top right row. To add such an object to the map, you need to leave a review indicating the name, location, rating and description. If you did this first, you will receive the status of the discoverer of this place. Reviews are available for viewing by other users in the “Guide Guides” section, where, through the efforts of travelers, a significant information base has been formed. Useful information from it can be added to “Favorites”. In addition to reviews, you can post photos and videos. Another feature worth mentioning is the ability to plan future trips in a similar way to reporting on existing ones.

⇡ Marshruty.ru

This site is a community of traveling people. It contains a large amount of reference information, topographic maps, books, routes, a calendar of events, searches for places, schedules and tickets, hotels, a forum and services such as an online store of tourist equipment, car rental. Among the functions is the ability to create reports on the routes taken and a map of your travels. Registration is quite unusual: you need to correctly answer at least three out of five geographical questions - where is Kamchatka, Baikal and the like. Interestingly, to answer you need to set a marker on Google Maps; if you put it in the wrong place, you will be asked to choose one of four answer options.

Registration on Marshruty.ru. Passing the Geography Test

Once you have given the correct answers, you should complete the registration, then add at least five travel destinations by train or plane - this is necessary to create the initial travel map. Here you select the starting and ending points of the trip, as well as the type of transport. The service uses its own database of geographic objects, which is not as extensive as Google Maps, and you won’t find the most remote settlements on the list. What is noteworthy is that the routes are laid taking into account existing railways and airlines, the distance in kilometers is even shown (route diagrams of existing carrier companies are taken, and on some routes a link is provided to obtain more extensive information). Although if you specify a non-existent route (by train to the USA), then a straight line will be drawn between the two points. The only frustrating thing here is that the map does not take into account road traffic.

Adding initial travel directions to Marshruty.ru

By filling out your travel directions, you can mark the places you visited by simply indicating the cities, seas, rivers, mountains and caves you visited. Cities are grouped by region and country, and other objects are also divided by region. It is worth saying that there are significantly fewer of them in the directory than settlements (only the most famous ones are Volga, Everest and the like), and you will have to indicate the location of most of the conquered peaks and traversed rivers manually. To do this, you need to provide brief information about the object - type, name, description, where it is located - and mark the point on Google Maps. All added objects on your map (mountains, rivers, etc.) are highlighted with a symbolizing icon; visited regions will also be highlighted and the extreme points of travel on the four cardinal points will be marked.

Active traveler map on Marshruty.ru

You can generate not only a travel map, but also reports on the routes taken; links to them will be present in the description of added objects. A new route is added in several stages. First you need to enter the name, description, travel area, start and end dates, indicate the types of activities (cycling, diving, and so on). You can then edit the interactive route map. This is done either manually or by importing a ready-made track, which can be downloaded from a GPS navigator or created using Google Earth - wpt, gpx, kml and kmz formats are supported. If you are creating a route yourself, then you should add the places you visited one by one (these can be either settlements from the directory or “stops on the side of the road”) and draw a travel line. Switching to drawing mode is done by clicking on the map; you can create an unlimited number of points, forming a path trajectory. You can also link photos to the card. To do this, you need to add an album, upload pictures to it and associate them with a place, which is done automatically if they contain geotags in EXIF ​​information (there is also another function - combining images by date and time with a track from a GPS navigator), or manual mode, by marking a cross on the map for each photo.

The route report on Marshruty.ru is replete with various information

Unfortunately, created maps cannot be embedded on your website or blog - you can only share links to them. Site visitors have the opportunity to view your profile, which displays the number of countries, cities and other places visited, the total length of rail trips and air flights (in kilometers), and the extreme points reached.

⇡ Panoramio.com

Strictly speaking, Panoramio is not a service for travelers, but it is perfect for this role - however, only if you bring back heaps of pictures from your trips. This site, owned by Google, is designed to post photographs with geographic coordinates. The uploaded images will be displayed on your map in the places where they were taken, allowing you to assess the geography of your movement around the world. In addition, after verification by the moderator, the photos will be available for viewing by other users of the service, and will also be displayed in the Google Earth program when the “Images” layer is active.

You can log in to the site using your Google account. After this, you need to upload photos, they are also imported from Picasa Web Albums or Google+. If the file already contains geographic coordinates in the EXIF ​​information, the service will automatically detect them; otherwise, you need to link photos to Google Maps. To do this, you need to drag the marker to the appropriate place on the map (you can use the search) and click the “Done” button.

Linking photos to a map on Panoramio.com

You should know that the pictures will become publicly available after a certain amount of time required by the moderators - from a couple of hours to several days. In Google Earth, they then become visible when the database is updated, which happens several times a week. Regardless of whether your photos have been moderated or not, you can view your photos in both ways - on a map and in Google Earth by downloading a file with tags in kml format. The map will look something like the following screenshot - you can place a link to it wherever you want.

Of course, such a map cannot be made by the efforts of one person. But you need to strive for this

Similar functionality is present on the Yandex.Photos website with their “Photo on Map” service. If you are a Yandex supporter, you can just as easily use a similar solution from a domestic company.

⇡ Conclusion

To summarize this review, we cannot say for sure which of the services is the best for creating a travel map - they all use their own approach to accomplish this task. Tripline.net allows you to create vivid presentation videos about your trips. On Tripster.ru you can mark all the cities and countries you have visited. Flagatrip.ru is more of a social network where users publish reports and reviews. The Marshruty.ru service adheres to a certain scientific approach when analyzing travel. Finally, Panoramio.com will be useful for those who like to travel the world with a camera.