How to use the maps
Being the basis of how Blotanical operates, it may pay to take a few minutes to hone your skills interacting with the Google Maps.
They're a great way of locating and finding garden blogs but without the tools at your disposal, they can seem difficult and unworkable. So let me explain a few of the basics;
Here's the map we all see when we first arrive at Blotanical. It's the highest zoomed out version of the globe and allows us to see each country in a flattened out map. The Flower icons dotted across the globe display where individual bloggers are located.
You can find every garden blogger from this spot or you can choose one of the regional headings (Oceania, US, UK etc) in the navigation bar. These links are still the same maps that have been centred on a particular location and zoomed in a few more times. They have been created for the purpose of traversing the globe faster. Plus, each region only displays the blogs that reside within it.
From this perspective you can see that some of the US map is cut off, namely the extreme east and west tips. This is okay as it still fits in most of the blogs located in this region. However, you may want to zoom in closer where the Flower icons are congested or zoom out further to find Christopher in Hawaii. How do you do that? With this tool;
The top 4 arrows are for moving from east to west and north to south. The bottom two are for zooming in and out. Click the "+" to zoom in one level or the "-" to zoom out one level.
However, if you want to do this quicker than clicking on the buttons the same thing can be achieved with your mouse.
Place your cursor on a location (not on a flower) and left double-click to zoom in, right double-click to zoom out. Each time a zoom occurs it centers the map wherever you clicked your cursor.
If you want to move from left to right or up and down then, while holding your left click, move your cursor around. Cool isn't it?
What to do if the Flowers are hard to see on the map background? Change it of course with this tool located at the top right-hand corner of the map;
The default view is Map which is what you see whenever you first look at one of the maps. It shows boundaries, borders, cities, roads and other map features. These change with each zoom level.
The next view is Satellite. This removes all the cartographical features and just shows the satellite images with landforms. Like this;
It may be hard to see where exactly the blog is located in the midst of these landforms so another option is Hybrid - basically a combination of Satellite and Map.
And that, in a nutshell, is how you use Google Maps. Feel free to ask questions in the comments field and let me know if you found this helpful.