Administration

Manage Your Region Setting to Access More Useful Local Content

ArcGIS Online provides you access to many useful maps and apps that you can explore and use in your work.  Many of these maps and apps are featured in the Living Atlas of the World, which is accessible to you in various ways in ArcGIS Online and other ArcGIS applications.

One way you can enhance the content that is featured to you and other users in your organization is through the Region setting.  Users with a public account and administrators of an organization can use the Region setting to influence the content in the gallery, layers in the map viewer, and default extent of new maps.

For example, if you are primarily interested in content for the United States, you can set that as your Region and then ArcGIS Online will feature detailed content for this region in addition to the World content that is featured for all users.  This will give you easy access to additional maps and apps (such as USA NAIP Imagery, USA Demographic Maps, ZIP Code Boundaries, Severe Weather Map, Battle of Gettysburg, etc.) focused on the United States.

This additional content is featured in multiple places in ArcGIS Online, including the gallery and map viewer.  In the gallery, you can select the Area for which you would like to view content.  The default is All (i.e. World and your local region), but you can select just your local region (see below).  You can also sort the content; the default is Most Recent but you can also sort by Highest Rated, Most Viewed, and other options (see below).

Gallery of Maps for United States
The gallery features maps for the World and your local region, such as the United States.

In the map viewer, you can access featured map layers (i.e. map services, feature services, image services, etc.) when you Add content to the map.  When you select the Browse Living Atlas Layers option, you are presented a gallery of map layers that are available for your current map extent.  This includes layers curated by Esri that are of value and interest to users worldwide.  If you have set a region for a specific area of interest (such as United States), you may see additional layers available for that country when it is within your current map extent.  You can further filter this set of layers by selecting a category (see below), searching by keyword, or showing layers from Esri only.

Browse Living Atlas Layers
You can Add content to your map through Browse Living Atlas Layers. Layers presented are based on your Region.

You can set your region either in your user profile (for Public Account users) or in your organization settings (for Organizational Subscription users).  For detailed steps, visit the ArcGIS Online Help topic.  Configure your region setting to more easily access the most useful content for you and your organization.

About the author

Deane Kensok has been with Esri since 1990 and is currently the ArcGIS Content CTO and a member of the Living Atlas team. For the past twenty years, Deane has worked on a variety of Internet mapping and data publishing products and projects, which have led to his current work with ArcGIS Online and the Living Atlas.

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