How to add routes to your map

Do you know about unique trips and journeys? Wouldn’t it be great to have it in one map and share this with your guests or friends? Read on and learn more. It doesn’t matter if you want to create a tour around your favourite bars in town, route through the secret beautiful places near your house, plan a journey for your next travels, routes for bikes, dogs, mothers with strollers… Your imagination can run wild, this tool is very flexible and has a wide usage. Here are some examples:

How to do it?

• NEW FEATURE! Create a route directly in your map. More info here.
• Register on mapotic.com and create a map
• Create a category for the routes  (all places and routes must be placed in a category)
• Create a route here https://www.google.com/mymaps (you need a gmail account)
• Export routes from Google Maps or Mapy.cz in KML / KMZ format
• Import the file with routes through Mapotic

CATEGORIES

The category should be set before the route is created. More about categories here.

Examples of route categories and usage:

• Race map: section 1, section 2, section 3, …
• Winter piste map: easy piste, medium piste, hard piste,…
• Map of the hotel surroundings: cycling, hiking trails, wine cellars tour, …
• Cycling map: up to 5km, up to 10km, up to 15km,…
• Trip map: day 1, day 2, day 3,…

Let’s create a simple map with routes suitable for dog walks in Brno. First we design the route and afterwards we can add some points on interest around the way. In our example we have categories “Walks” and “Transport”.

THE ROUTE

• We’ll open your www.google.com/mymaps page and sign in with your Gmail account.
• Click on “Create new map”. We can add routes in this new map. You need to name the layer (Untitled layer) with same name as the category on our Mapotic map. In our case “Walks”.

• To draw a route, it is most convenient to use a simple line (“Add line or shape”), which can also lead through a landscape where the path is not marked. We choose this option.

• I zoom in the map and find the location where I want my route to begin (you can use the search bar).

• Create a route by clicking on the map. 

• Once we are satisfied with our route, we can save it by double clicking on the map. We name the route which will be used in our map on Mapotic (can be changed later).

• In the left menu we see an overview of the layers and routes on this map. If I want to create a route with a different category, I simply add a new layer to the map (“add layer”) and repeat the process. In our example, we have two layers – “Walks” and “Transport”. There is one route in each layer.

EXPORT

• We expand the menu and click on “Export to KML/KMZ”. We Save it as KML file to our computer.

IMPORT

• We open administration section of our map on Mapotic. Choose Content -> Import, click on “New import”. A form for importing files will open and we upload our KML file saved from Google MyMaps.

• Since the import things for us is the name, category and address, for the remaining cells we choose “do not import”.

• We click on verify import and if everything is fine, routes will be imported. There may be some error described in the error message (usually it is a difference between category name on our map and imported data).
• Perfect, we are done!

• Now we can play with it. Change the image, title and description by clicking on the route. We can add different points of interest around the way.

We find this tool a very useful and believe you will like it as well. Have fun with creating your maps and routes!