Questions and Answers About Interactive Maps and Floor Plans

Tours are hosted at tour.mapsalive.com.  Our server has demonstrated 99.999% network availability, which means that the network will be down no more than 5 minutes a year — as close to perfect as you can get.

The tours you create with MapsAlive are hosted independently of the MapsAlive web application.  If, for example, MapsAlive is down for maintenance, your tours are still available.

Yes. See our download page to learn how.

Simple tours only take minutes to create.  More complete tours might take a few hours depending on the number of maps and hotspots, and how much time you spend writing descriptive text.

A MapsAlive tour is one or more interactive maps that display in a web browser and let you explore any map by mousing over points of interest to see photographs and text. A tour is one or more interactive maps. It is implemented as a set of files that behave as interactive maps when opened in a web browser. The interactive maps in a tour are usually related to each other. A tour is created by the Tour Builder when you publish a project.

With a MapsAlive interactive map you never have to leave the map and you don't have browser windows popping up all over the place. You mouse over markers on the map and immediately see photos and text associated with each marker — no clicking required. 

You can create your own tours using your own maps and photos — there is no need to hire a virtual tour provider (unless you want to).  MapsAlive tours can be standalone web sites or can be embedded directly into your own web page.  And, you can use any image as a map.

A MapsAlive map is an image of anything that you want to explore. For example, it could be a floor plan, a Google Earth image of a neighborhood, a city map, an organization chart, or even a diagram of the human body. You place markers on maps that let you interactively see text and images associated with each marker.

A hotspot is a location on an interactive map that causes some action to occur when the mouse moves over it, off of it, or clicks it. The size, shape, and appearance of a hotspot are indicated by a marker. Hotspots most commonly show images, text, or video when the mouse moves over them, but they can also be used to execute JavaScript in response to a mouseover or a click, or they can link to a URL or another map in your tour when they are clicked. For example, you might have a kitchen hotspot on a floor plan of a house that displays a photo of the kitchen and descriptive text about the kitchen. You create a hotspot for each marker you place on a map.

Hotspots can be used to display photos, other images, text descriptions, videos or HTML content.  Hotspots can also have tooltip text and click actions such as linking to a URL or executing Javascript. 

You can display many different kinds of content in your interactive tours, including:

• Images
• Text
• Video
• Flash 
• HTML
• Tour-in-Tour™
• Web Pages
• Google maps

You can upload images, type and format text, enter HTML code and use macros to add content to your tour. Your images, text, videos and other content displays when you move your mouse over markers on your map.

Yes. You can display video or other media in a couple of different ways. You can paste the HTML code for the video into the Multimedia field on the Edit Hotspot Content screen or you can use the flash-macro in the Text field on the Edit Hotspot Content screen.

Note: Your video must already be hosted on a server somewhere such as YouTube or your own server. You cannot upload a video or movie directly to MapsAlive.

See the  How To FAQ for instructions on how to add video.

You can have as many maps as you want in your tour. Each map has its own set of hotspots and only one map displays at a time in a web page.

You can have as many hotspot as you want in your tour so long as you have purchased enough hotspots for the number of markers you will use on your map.  Remember that you can use hotspots to display photos, text descriptions, or both, and you can use them to display a tooltip, link to another map or data sheet in your tour or a URL, or execute Javascript.

When you first create a tour you can choose an approximate tour size. MapsAlive will fit your map and hotspot images within the tour size you choose, but you can change your tour layout and size at any time.  The size you choose depends on how you plan to use your tour and the sizes of your maps and images. If you will be using your tour as a standalone web site, you can make it any size you want, keeping in mind the most common monitor sizes. If your tour is bigger that what fits on a monitor your users will have to use the scroll bars to see parts of the maps.

If you are embedding your tour within another web page (such as a real estate listing page) you should choose a tour width and height that fits within the space available on that web page.

Another factor in deciding how big your tour should be is the size of your map and hotspot images. MapsAlive will automatically reduce maps and images if they are larger than the space available based on your tour size, but you should consider how large you want them to be.

To maximize the space available for your map you can use popups that appear on top of the map image when you mouse over markers.  This lets you use more space for the map itself.  Another option is to use MapZoom for large map images. This feature lets you display a large map in a smaller area on your page because you can zoom in and out and drag the map to view different areas.

The maximum image size for a map is 2880 x 2880 pixels. This is a Flash limitation so it cannot be increased. Even if you are not using Flash for your generated tours, the limitation is still enforced because the MapsAlive application itself uses Flash. But, in practice that would be a pretty large image and would be fairly slow to load. You'll want to choose an image size that preserves the quality of your image, but is not so large that is slows down the load time.

If you upload a larger map, MapsAlive will scale it so its longest side is no greater than 2880 and the smaller side will be scaled accordingly. As an example, if you upload a map image that is 2780 px (w) x 10188 px (h), the longest side (h) will be scaled to 2880 px and the width will be scaled to 712 px.

You can see the dimensions of your uploaded map on the Map > Choose Map Image screen.

You must login to your account to edit your tour. Unless you give someone your email and password there is no way that anyone else can modify your tour.

Your tour is hosted for as long as you have an active MapsAlive plan.  MapsAlive plans are good for one year. When your plan is close to expiring, we will send you an email message reminding you to renew.

Yes. You can login to your account at any time to edit your tour.  You can add or delete maps or hotspots and change existing maps and hotspots. To see your changes on the web, you publish your tour again by going to Tour Preview and clicking the Publish button.

You supply the images and text for the maps and hotspots in your tour. You upload them from your hard drive when you create a tour.

Yes.  So long as you have an active MapsAlive plan you can delete tours and create new ones.  And, you can replace photos and text at any time.

Yes, you can import several kinds of content in one operation to save time creating and updating your tours.

You can import a zip file of photos and MapsAlive will automatically create or update hotspots from the photos found in the zip file.

You can also import hotspot content including titles, text, media, marker names, and categories. And you can import HTML area tags and have MapsAlive automatically create polygon-shaped markers from them. Note: The Import Hotspot Content feature is included in the Plus and Pro Plans.

To learn more, see the MapsAlive User Guide to Content Management (download pdf).

Yes, you can display multiple images for the same hotspot with the image-macro. By design, the Edit Hotspot Content screen only lets you upload one photo per hotspot, but if you want to display more than one image, you can embed them in the hotspot’s text field. This gives you more flexibility when creating hotspot content, and is also useful if you are using a text-only layout, but have just one or two hotspots with images.

Yes. The Live Data feature lets you access your own database through Javascript calls and view updated data in real time. Learn More.

Note: The Live Data feature is included in the Pro Plan.

• flash-macro
• iframe-macro
• image-macro
• linkto-macro
• tour-macro

To use these macros you type them in the Text field on the Edit Hotspot Content screen. Refer to How to Edit a hotspot and the specific entries for each kind of macro for more details. To learn more see the MapsAlive User Guide for Macros.

Galleries work the same way as maps. By default, they are hosted for you automatically on mapsalive.com, but you have the option to download them and host them on your own server.

No. Data sheets do not have a map so there are no hotspots either. You can add as many data sheets as you want to your tour.

MapsAlive currently supports jpeg, gif and swf files for your map image. If your map is in PDF format you can convert it to a jpeg file using any number of online or desktop based conversion programs. Or, if you have Adobe Illustrator or another image program that can open a PDF file, you can probably use it to convert to jpeg.

One free option for converting a PDF to a jpeg is called Zamzar. It is an online file conversion program that lets you browse for your PDF file, convert to any image format including jpeg, and then they email you a link to retrieve the converted file. Zamzar is available here: http://www.zamzar.com.