How to Create a Property Map with Google Maps

hi I'm Amy grata with the Oregon State University Extension Service and I'm going to show you how to make a map of your property like this one here using Google Maps first of all in order to create and save a map in Google Maps you'll have to sign in using a Google account you can use a gmail address to sign in or create a new account sign in here in the upper right once you've signed in click on the 3 bars to the left of the search field to bring up a menu of options click on your places and then on maps here's the map that I showed you at the beginning I'm gonna make one just like that for this demo by going down and creating a new map here at the bottom of the screen to navigate to your property you can either zoom in or you can type in a specific address the Matteson forests which I'm going to use for this example does not have a street address but I can type in the rodas located on here Seth Southwest hankins wrote in Gaston Oregon and here we are now I'll scroll in further and once I get to the property if i zoom in far enough Google Maps will show you the tax lot boundaries in this faint gray lines I'm gonna use those to draw the property boundary I'll select this line tool and add a line or shape now I can just click on the corners of the property to create my boundary now the Matteson forest is made up of several parcels so I'll have to outline all of them and it's larger than what will fit on my screen so I'll use the arrow keys on my keyboard to move around as I go once I've got to the beginning I can click on my starting point to create my shape now if I've made a mistake and any of these points are in the wrong place before I saved my shape I can move them if I need to by clicking and dragging to what it need to be once I'm happy with it I'll give it a name and there we go now Google Maps will show you the acreage of the shape you've created here 180 acres now I'm going to change the the base map and go to satellite view and up will come an aerial photo of the property I don't want my property to be filled in here so I'm going to change the transparency by clicking on the style button I'll change the transparency so that the photo shows through and I think I'll change the color of the border I'm gonna make it yellow and I can make it thicker as well okay there we go now I'm going to add a few more shapes let's say I want to highlight specific areas on the property in this example I'm going to draw around areas that were recently reforested so I'll add some new shapes here's one area now I think I'll make a different color I'll make it white another one right here and then one more to organize these features I'm gonna add a layer to my map I'll call it planted 2016 and now I'm gonna drag these polygons down into this layer by clicking and dragging them down one at a time the advantage here is that I can toggle this layer on and off by checking the box so your map can be customized to show just the information that you want at any given time now I can also add points to my map by using this marker button I'm going to mark the gates to the property here's our main gate right here and I think I'll change it to a star we have a couple of other gates as well so I'll add those you know add a layer for the case once again I can toggle that layer on and off now another useful feature in Google Maps is that you can upload files that you might have created with GPS in this case I was out at the property recently and I saw an area that had some root disease and I marked it with the GPS feature on my phone and then imported it into my computer now I can import that into Google Maps I'll add a layer and I can import something from my computer so here are all my GPS files and here is the root disease point there it is right there I haven't given my map a title yet I'll do that now I can continue to add more points and features to my map but now I'll show you how to print it if you like to the right of the title is a menu of options and I'll select print and here's a PDF and you can save to your computer now the property is kind of small on this map so I can try again but first I'll zoom in a little bit that's better now this map is only viewable by you when you're logged in to your Gmail or your Google account or you can share it with somebody if you want by clicking the share button and up will come a place where you can invite certain people by adding in their names or email addresses and the link will be sent to them so that they can also view your map well that's all I wanted to share with you today I hope that was useful and helps you to create maps of your own property

Channel: amygrotta

Views: 333,097

Rating: 4.7655106 out of 5

Keywords: forestry, Google Maps, woodlands, Extension

Id: 7XIw3fqOxWM

Length: 9min 5sec (545 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 08 2016