ArcGIS StoryMaps helps you tell remarkable stories with custom maps that inform and inspire. A story can effect change, influence opinion, and create awareness—and maps are an integral part of storytelling. ArcGIS StoryMaps can give your narrative a stronger sense of place, illustrate spatial relationships, and add visual appeal and credibility to your ideas.

We update ArcGIS StoryMaps regularly with new features and capabilities. We’ve got a few more releases remaining this year, and we’re excited about what’s coming before 2021 draws to a close!

Read on to learn about what’s been added this month…

• Duplicate immersive blocks
• Map actions in large paragraphs
• Drag and drop text blocks
• Add media items to a collection
• And more…

Duplicate immersive blocks

The ability to duplicate an entire story is an extremely useful capability that we introduced early on in the lifetime of ArcGIS StoryMaps (April 2020, to be exact). You can also duplicate individual slides within an immersive, which can be helpful for building a sidecar with map choreography.

Now, you can duplicate not just a single immersive slide, but an entire immersive block. Duplicating a whole tour or sidecar can let you try out different treatments or lets you easily revisit a part of your story. Check out the video below to see another useful way to use this feature: breaking a longer map tour up into two shorter tours.

Map actions in large paragraphs

Previously, map actions were supported only in regular paragraphs, but now you can use all that great map action goodness in large paragraphs as well. Please note that converting a paragraph block with a map action to large paragraph is not supported at this time.

Drag and drop text blocks

If you need to move a text block to a new location in your story, you can now do that simply by dragging it. Hovering over a text block now shows a drag handle, similar to the one previously available for media blocks. Just grab it and drag!

This feature is most helpful if you’re moving a text block a short distance. You can still use it to drag text longer distances across your story, but copy/paste is often easier in that case. Currently you can drag content around within the same immersive slide, but moving text into, out of, or between immersive slides still should be done via copy/paste.

Add media to a collection

Collections are a great way to group together a set of stories that you want to share as a set. In addition to stories, you can also add other types of items to a collection as supporting content. This previously included ArcGIS apps and websites, and now you can add images and videos directly to a collection. This can be done by uploading a media file from your computer or by linking to an image or video on the web.

Check out the video below to see how easy it is!

And more…

We’ve also made some design updates to the builder header and device preview page to improve the overall experience. You can review the release notes for a complete list of updates and fixes in every update.

Thanks to StoryMaps editorial team member Will Hackney for his contributions to this post.

Banner photo by Valentino Funghi on Unsplash