One of the things that has troubled me for years about living in the Philippines, learning about living in the Philippines, helping people move to the Philippines, etc., has been the near complete lack of decent digital maps for the Philippines. It’s very hard to “point” someone to any kind of digital map online, and many of the ones that exists are inaccurate or out of date.
For the past several years now, Google Earth and Google Maps
(A tip, some folks have been confused over this in the past. Google Earth and Google Maps are two separate services. Google Earth requires a download to your computer, Google Maps is a service available right from the Google Home Page, just select “Maps” from the menu bar at the top.)
have done stalwart service in bringing us some great “overhead” imagery … satellite photos and also photos taken from aircraft), but, fascinating as they are, a photo is not a map and vice versa. recently I noticed some activity on Google Maps that seemed to provide a lot more “real map” detail. Today I read an article that gave a lot of background on what’s happening here (thanks Mita) Google launches Filipino-made Google Maps | ABS-CBN News Online Beta
Here’s about the best you could do with these maps before the latest update efforts. And here’s how some of the metro areas have already been updated. No matter if you love or hate Google, this is a great service. I used to contract out map work for a living and I can tell you for sure, this is millions of dollars worth of work being given freely to the world by the folks at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, California.
If you aren’t yet familiar with Google Maps, especially the small ones embedded in web pages, here’s about all you need to know. Zoom in or zoom out using the plus-minus buttons in the upper left corner, pan (or move the map center around) with the the upper left arrow keys, or by left clicking and dragging the map with your mouse, and select map view, satellite view or terrain features with the buttons in the top right corner. Down at the bottom left should be a hyperlink that will let you make the map full screen. Overall, a pretty decent user interface.
Now that Google maps has become even more useful, you can easily make your own map of places you are interested in, automatically in road map, image or terrain map format, save it, or even embed it in another web page with one click. Some may be interested in a couple of my earlier Google maps articles:
- How To Make A Google Map | PhilFAQS
- Getting Around the Philippines By Air | PhilFAQS
- Things To Do — Go To The Mall | PhilFAQS (on this one, if you zoom in on Luzon and look for the red triangle symbol, you can see exactly where I live in Marilao, Bulacan, Philippines)
The mapping details aren’t yet up to US or European standards, but they are getting there at a very impressive rate. Next stop (I hope) will be live traffic displays like Google has for major US metro areas. (Hey, I can dream, can’t I?)
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