Easy Story Maps

Scroll driven maps can be a great way to tell a story using text, images and your own choice of maps. It is possible to create your own scroll driven story maps using any of the main mapping platforms. Alternatively you can save yourself a lot of work by using a simple Story Map template, like Mapme Stories, CartoDB's Odyssey or Esri Story Maps.

The Mapme map creation tool includes Mapme Stories, a free platform to create amazing stories. Using the Mapme Story editor you can quickly combine text, photos, videos and maps to create your own structured narrative,

A good example of Mapme Stories in action is this Westeros Seven Kingdoms Map. This structured story map takes you on a tour of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. It includes a custom Westeros map, video clips from the TV series and animated gif's.

Esri Story Maps is another simple way to create interesting mapped narratives about any subject. Esri Story Maps provides a number of easy to use templates that allow you to combine map and satellite views with multimedia and other interactive features to create an interactive mapped presentation.

You can get a good sense of the type of story maps you can create with Esri Story Maps on the Esri Story Maps Gallery.

CartoDB's Odyssey story map platform also includes a number of templates that allow you to combine text, multimedia and maps into a simple narrative. Two very popular Odyssey story map templates are the slide template (forward and back buttons allow you to progress through the story) and the scroll template (progress through the story by scrolling).

You can view a live example of the scroll template in this demo map, this demo map also explains how to create your own CartoDB Odyssey story map.