Adding Photos and More to Note Popups

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:21:00 GMT

We've recently had a few questions about adding photos, links to Web sites, and more to a note popup window. Here's a primer on how that's done. But before we get to the "photos and more" part, let's start at the beginning...

We've navigated to Mt. Shasta, California, where we'd like to add a note. To create a note, just choose the Create Notes task. We've changed the note title to "Mt. Shasta" and added a short description - "Mt. Shasta, California - 14,179 feet" - as the note text.

When you hover over the note pushpin, you'll see the note title display. When you click the note pushpin, you'll see something like this:

Let's take this one step further and replace the text with a locally stored photo on our C: drive. Right click the Mt. Shasta note in the results panel, or right click the note pushpin on the map, and choose properties.

Below you can see that we've changed the popup content from our original text (Mt. Shasta, California - 14,179 feet) to the pathname to the file: C:\AGX\Photos\shasta_usgs.jpg.

When we click the note pushpin again, we see something like this:

The USGS publishes photos of Mt. Shasta from their Web site, so we can substitute the local photo with one that's available on the Web. The advantage here is that anyone we send the note to can click the pushpin and see the photo since it's a publicly accessible photo rather than one stored on the local C: drive, which nobody else can access.

All we need to do is replace the local file path in the Popup Text property with the URL location of the photo at the USGS Web site: http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Imgs/Jpg/Shasta/Images/Shasta05_aerial_mount_shasta_shastina_from_west_12-10-05_med.jpg

The note popup will look the same as before, but this time the content is Web-based and shareable rather than a local file. To share this with someone, just right click the note and choose export result.

The NMF file you save can be emailed to anyone, and they'll see the same thing you do since the result is linking to publicly available content.

We can extend the popup contents by using HTML. The HTML isn't required if we just want to display text or a single link to a local file or URL like we've done above. But we can use it to add additional content or format the popup contents. Here we're adding a note that will include a title in bold text to our USGS photo:

And now the popup should look something like this:

And now to the "more" part of this post. Here's the HTML you can use to popup a photo of a bird, and also play the sound of its call.

The use of hidden in the embed tag ensures that the program that plays the sound remains invisible.

You can be as creative as you want. For more information visit the HTML markup for notes, results, and files topic found in the ArcGIS Explorer Help.

ArcGIS Explorer Blog : sound files

Adding Photos and More to Note Popups