Notes are an easy way to add a wide variety of non-GIS content to your map, like photos, videos, Web pages, PDF files, and more. Using notes you can place any of these in a geographic context, and use them with other layers in your map and in presentations. Here we'll take a look at how to use notes to add photos to your map.

The other weekend we were up in the Sierra Nevada range, near a peak named Chocolate Peak, and took a GPS reading and some photos. One option would be to place a point note interactively by clicking the map at the desired location of where we want to place the photo. But since we took a GPS reading, let's use the GPS location to place it. Here's the steps.

Use Find and enter the GPS coordinates

Once the location has been entered, you'll see a pushpin on the map. Right click to move the location to your map contents. When you do it becomes a note.

Here's the note in our contents.

Next we'll click the note title to change it. We could also change this when editing the popup window as you'll see below, but we'll take care of this here.

Our next step is to edit the popup window contents and add the path to our photo. There are a variety of ways to open the popup window. We could click the note pushpin on the map, or can right-click the note in our contents and choose Show Popup.

And another way is by using the contextual tabs which apear in the ribbon. Click Popup Content to open the popup window directly in edit mode.

Once the popup window is open, we want to make sure we're in edit mode by clicking in the lower right corner of the popup window.

All we need to do now is add the path to our photo. We can also edit the title again if we want to.

 

The path can also be a URL, and using public URL locations is a good way to make sure that users we share our map or note with can also see our photo in the popup. Obviously if we use a local path on our laptop another user may not be able to see the photo in the popup. If we use a more widely accessible network location or public URL, then any user can view our photo.

And we can even E-mail our note directly from the popup window to share it with others.

You can get more information about notes by viewing the following Help topics: