Map for travel photo book

[tim848]

Hi all. Its been a while since I visited this forum for various reasons, but good to be back!

I'm making my first book in Lr (latest cc) for publishing in Blurb - its a travel photobook of a recent trip to New Zealand. I'd like to create a simple map which shows our route, main cities, roads, features etc and use this as an early page in the book. Not sure if Lr can do this or whether there's alternative software that will allow me to create the map and then export as a pdf or jpeg and import into the book in Lr. I don't want to tag images or for the map to be interactive in any way. I want the map to be simple and minimalist without all the clutter that interactive maps seem to have. There used to be a simple map making capability in iPhoto I remember but that's 'back in the day'. Any advice please - Mymaps in Google looks too complicated and fussy for my purpose I think. Thanks.

 

[clee01l]

Google maps can build an itinerary. Routes will follow roads when practical Click on the Google Map menu and choose "My Places", then "Maps" and finally "Create a map". You can print to a PDF or do a screen save to a PNG or JPG.

 

[tim848]

Thanks Cletus. I have actually used google maps for setting out itineraries and working out travel times etc in the past, but for my book its unfortunately quite a bit too "fussy" for my purposes, unless you can suggest how to remove the As, Bs, stars etc and 'minimalise' the appearance. What I'm after is a really clean minimalist map without clutter, if possible. It was possible in iPhoto (see example) but that's a dead application now unfortunately.

 

[clee01l]

Those "A's", "B's" and stars are my route segment points for a road trip that I did recently. The Stars are Points of interest that I have mapped for places that I want to see/photo. None of these need appear on the final map. Even the route color and width can be defined by the user. Take a look at Googles mapping tools to see if it might offer the minimalist map that you want.

 

[tim848]

Hi Cletus - mate, thanks for this advice. I've now drawn my simple map I'm MyMaps - instead of using 'directions' I just used 'draw a line'. No A's and B's or stars and, as you advised I was able to change the colour and width of the line and get the underlying base map to look how I wanted - nice and minimalist.

Exporting from MyMaps in KML format into Google Earth as recommended in a Google forum I looked at didn't really work, so I set the map to 'print' in MyMaps and selected 'image' format rather than PDF and then without actually printing, dragged the resulting JPEG into Lightroom, where I could tweak the sharpness etc. Slightly unconventional maybe but seemed to work. Thanks again, Tim.