Google Maps Static Service

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 Blog, Freelance, Programming, Website Design by admin

Today I found out about an amazing service from google. The google Maps Static API.

The challenge/problem:

I have a client I am building a site for that has many county and city pages. I needed to add a much location specific content, design elements, etc to each of the county/city pages.

I had noticed when you google “Sarasota, FL” that google has a nice static map, so i thought i would type in each city and save the map, name it as the city and the have a dynamic link so for each page it would show the map image.

My other option was to find a way to use the FULL google maps api and have their entire interactive map service load on every page, but it would slow down page time and the whole google maps is just too much… i only needed a picture to fill some white space.

The Solution:

While searching around I found that there was a Google Maps Static API Service.

http://maps.google.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=Sarasota,FL&zoom=14&size=400x400&sensor=false\
&key=YOUR_API_KEY

This will output the following:

You can edit everything about the image.

• Size
• Zoom Level
• Centering
• Censoring (detecting users location from ip)

Simple exchanging “Sarasota, FL” out with some php and you can have a map generated for every city, state in USA and abroad.

I think it’s a excellent service that is under used majorly.