The magic of ArcGIS StoryMaps has always come from giving storytellers a unique ability to combine narrative and multimedia components with maps. That formula is especially exemplified in the map tour block, one of the most popular features of ArcGIS StoryMaps. In map tour, a sequence (guided layout) or array (explorer layout) of points is presented on a map, along with accompanying text and media for each point. The slick interactivity of map tours belies how easy it is to create them, even for authors with little to no cartography experience.
In February, 2021, we added the option to instantly create a map tour from an ArcGIS feature service. This ability (referred to as a “data-driven map tour”) was made even more robust in February, 2025, by allowing authors to categorize the items within their data-driven tour. Categorization was an option in the Classic Story Maps Shortlist template, and its arrival in ArcGIS StoryMaps had been eagerly anticipated.
In order to enjoy the benefits of the data-driven tour, though, it’s important to know a few key things when you see that intriguing “Start with a feature service” button upon adding a new map tour to a story. For instance, what exactly is a feature service? Where can you find one? And what makes a particular feature service suitable to use as the basis of a map tour?
These are questions I, myself would have struggled to answer prior to joining the StoryMaps team, and so I wanted to write this blog post to share how simple a concept the data-driven tour actually is. In fact, if the content you want to display in a map tour isn’t already nicely packaged in a feature service somewhere out there, it’s surprisingly easy to just create one yourself — requiring practically no GIS knowledge or skill.
This post will outline three approaches to populating a map tour with a feature service:
- Using an already-existing feature service
- Building your own feature service from scratch
- Using ArcGIS Survey123 to automatically populate a feature service
The mechanics of a data-driven map tour
First things first, it would be useful to understand the basics of how a data-driven map tour works.
Put as simply as possible for the purposes of the data-driven map tour, a feature service is essentially a layer of geospatial data that is made available over the web via ArcGIS Online or Enterprise. When you select a feature service to use to populate a map tour, the tour builder looks for certain attribute fields in the data that will determine what information will appear in the tour. (As the author of a data-driven tour, you can manually specify which fields those are in the tour data options.)
There are two attributes that are critical for a functional data-driven tour:
- Location. The data must have a field containing location data for discrete points. Often this is expressed as lat/long coordinates or as a street address.
- Name. A field containing text that will serve as the title of each point in the map tour.
And a few other attributes that are also pretty crucial for making the tour as engaging as possible:
- Description. A field containing text that will provide more in-depth narrative for each point.
- Media. Images can be directly attached to the items in the feature layer (more on that in a bit), or can be sourced via an attribute field containing a URL for each image.
- Alt text and attribution for media. It’s a best practice to provide alternative text for any media, as well as to give credit to the creator of the media.
If you choose to make your tour categorized, you’ll also need to specify a Category field that will be used to break the items down into said categories (each unique entry in that field will show up as one category).
Using an already-existing feature service to create a data-driven map tour
There’s so much geospatial data out there, and a great thing about the ArcGIS ecosystem is that it brings that data right to your fingertips. This means that there might already be feature services on which you can base a map tour that fits the topic of whatever you happen to be crafting a story about.
Before you plug a feature service into your map tour, though, you’ll want to check two things:
- Are you allowed to use the underlying data? Information like copyright restrictions, creative commons licenses, commercial use permission, and public domain status can often be found wherever you got the data from (e.g., a data hub website). The layer’s item page in ArcGIS Online can also be a good place to look.
- Is the data formatted in such a way that you’ll be able to construct a data-driven tour with it? In other words, does it contain all the attribute fields (the ones outlined above) that you’ll need to sufficiently populate the tour points? One easy way to investigate this is to open the layer in question in ArcGIS Map Viewer and then view the layer’s data table via the layer panel (see screenshot below).
When the categorized map tour functionality was added to ArcGIS StoryMaps, my talented colleague Warren was so excited to test it out that he immediately put together a categorized tour showcasing public art in his neighboring city of Kitchener, Ontario.
The reason he was able to put together such a spiffy categorized tour so quickly is because Kitchener (like many municipalities) has a hearty open data portal on the web and makes that data free for anyone to use. Plus, it just so happened that their public art data set was more or less ready to use in a categorized map tour right off the bat. In addition to fleshed out descriptions of each artwork, it also had a photo of each site attached, as well as an attribute for “Type,” which grouped the art installations into handy categories like sculpture, mural, etc.
But what if there isn’t a map tour-friendly data set available that you can use? Well, when push comes to shove, you can always…build your own! It’s not as scary as it sounds, I promise.
Building a do-it-yourself feature service
Now we get to the dirty little secret about feature services: their underlying data is basically just a glorified spreadsheet. That’s right, that means you can open up your spreadsheet software of choice and create the entire framework for what will ultimately become a data-driven map tour yourself by manually inputting the data. Seriously, it’s that simple; just make sure you’ve got all the relevant attribute fields covered.
For my own experiment with the categorized tour capability, I decided to recreate an old collection that presents four takes on the “Seven wonders of the world” concept. In that collection, each list of wonders — ancient, new, engineering, and natural — occupied its own story. I wanted to see how that same information could be displayed in one consolidated map tour, where the four lists would each comprise a distinct category of tour point.
When I started, that information was not neatly compiled in a ready-to-go data set. I was able to rectify that, though, simply by creating my own Excel file and populating fields for the site names, which of the four lists it belonged to, the site description, lat/long coordinates, and attributions and alternative text for each site’s accompanying image. (The images themselves I would add later as attachments, which is a separate process after the feature layer has been created in ArcGIS Online; if the images are hosted somewhere online, you can just add another attribute field containing the appropriate URL for each point).
[Note: lat/long is generally preferable for determining tour point locations; entering street addresses as your form of locational data will work, too, but it requires the use of ArcGIS Online credits.]
Once you’ve got your spreadsheet in good shape, you’ll need to save it as a .csv file and then upload it to ArcGIS Online, where the information you supplied will be transformed into a map-ready layer. Once it’s been layer-ized, if you were planning on adding images via attachment, this Esri Community post by Bern Szukalski can walk you through that process.
After that, when you select that “Start with a feature service” option when adding a map tour to a story, you’ll be able to find the data you uploaded in feature service form and populate the tour with it. The end result looks attractive and professional, and basically all it took to achieve that outcome was copying and pasting some stuff into a spreadsheet.
Though it was a mildly labor-intensive exercise, with only 28 sites in total, it didn’t take me too long to put that data together. But what if there’s substantially more data that you want to include in your tour? Or what if you want the flexibility to keep adding to the data without having to manually make changes to the original spreadsheet and re-upload it? Since you asked, I’ll mention one more workflow that can save some time and effort and comes with the added benefit of being able to perpetually add data to the feature service — even while that service is live in a map tour in a published story.
Using ArcGIS Survey123 to create and populate a feature service that can be used in a data-driven tour
If you’re not familiar, ArcGIS Survey123 is a tool available in ArcGIS Online that can be used for data-gathering and crowdsourcing through crafted surveys.
I won’t get too into the specifics of how to build surveys (there are plenty of resources for that available elsewhere in the Esriverse), but the main thing to know vis a vis data-driven map tours is that whenever you publish a survey, a feature layer is automatically created into which all the results of that survey are poured. Each survey “question” is represented by an attribute field in that feature layer.
This means that if you structure your survey to account for all those map tour-relevant attributes, you can more efficiently build out the data for a data-driven map tour by repeatedly inputting information into the survey and submitting as many times as necessary. There’s even an option to allow direct media uploads as part of a survey response.
And, as mentioned above, a huge benefit to using Survey123 is that even after you’ve added a map tour using survey-generated data to a story, any additional survey submissions automatically show up in that tour immediately — no action required by the author of the survey or the story where the tour is.
For a great example of this method in action, check out the story Share your EarthPlaces. In that story, we call on all readers to tell us about a place in the natural world that is meaningful to them. The centerpiece of the story is a data-driven map tour whose data is fueled by the results of a survey that is embedded immediately below the map tour. Readers can browse the most recent 200 submissions and, ideally having been inspired, can then submit their own special place via the survey. Their submission will immediately appear at the top of the map tour. It’s like magic, only better! Watch the short video below to see how this works from the user perspective, and visit this story to get additional guidance on setting up your own ArcGIS Survey123-to-ArcGIS StoryMaps workflows.
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I hope this blog post has given you an idea of what kinds of things are possible using data-driven map tours, while making that concept feel a lot less daunting if it’s something you hadn’t considered trying before. For a detailed guide to configuring a data-driven tour within the ArcGIS StoryMaps builder, give this tutorial a spin.
We’re constantly looking to enhance and improve the ArcGIS StoryMaps product, and we relish including our user community in that process. Newer features are often still in a beta phase when they’re publicly added to the product, including the categorized map tour layout, which is in beta as of the publication of this post. Please never hesitate to pass along your thoughts, questions, and suggestions via the in-app feedback form (select “Direct product feedback” for an open-ended text form), or give us a shout in the ArcGIS StoryMaps corner of the Esri Community discussion board.
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