Discussion: Where to store maps?

Advice sought on what must be a common problem...

I have a bunch of maps which I sync via google drive across my devices. I want to share them with a smallish number of people (say 50). I can't use the club website, because users are in various different clubs.

What's the best platform to do this?

If you already use Google Drive, you could share a link to the 50 people.

Excuse me for asking but could you tell this old guy what to 'sync via google drive' means?

We use Dropbox. It costs a small amount of money, but worth it for the ease of a access.

Yep create a folder on google drive and share that with the people you want to have see them

Are these scans/images, or CAD files?

Interesting, I'm enough of an old-timer that when I read the title "Where to store maps?" I assumed he was talking about where to put the pile of physical maps that we all accumulate over the years.

Yes me too. I have four drawers in my office that hold different map sets (MTBO, urban, bush and rogaine/AR) as well as a newly created pile on the junk room floor that appeared when I threw out the broken trunk I was storing them in (they're my older maps that I haven't got around to sorting yet).

A two-drawer filing cabinet with hanging folders, sorted by location, plus a big cabinet with five shallow drawers that I got for free, and that I'm very proud of. That's where the special maps live.

I have 2 xerox boxes full of old maps :(

Only a young bloke and collectively my sister, mum and I have filled two cabinets from only 8 years being in the sport. I usually store my o map files in my orienteering folder on my desktop, with sub-files of maps, courses, o geeking carnivals, etc.

Best not to sort in categories - I file them chronologically and use Attackpoint to find them by date. I'm now up to 28 Lever Arch files.

After 50+ years of up to a max of 100+ competitions per year, I've given up on paper storage several decades ago, since then it has been scans all the way.
I put them on my QucikRoute/Doma server where WorldOfO will do the spatial indexing for me. :-)

If only I had the opportunity to do 100+ competitions per year... (need to travel to Europe with their multitude of 3-5 day carnivals to even get close to that).

We use Dropbox. It costs a small amount of money, but worth it for the ease of a access.

This. We (as the state association) have an enterprise Dropbox account, which gives us 1TB or whatever of space and every master map, event map and PPen course file lives in there. A couple of us have full access to it, and various other people have access to specific folders (eg. MTBO people for MTBO maps).

If someone needs a copy of a map, you can generate a short-lived link to the required file and send that to them.

Graeme,

I think it's possible for you to share a specific folder within intomaps with people.

Certainly having everyone sign into is as a user doesn't work with all the double authentication security. I imagine you get quite a lot of emails saying someone tried to log in!

I use Dropbox , cost a little bit but much better than any other cloud platform I know..

Google Drive can meet your needs. If you'd like, we can meet via Google Hangouts or Zoom and I can show you. We use Google Drive and other Google products at work.

@nixon,

Thanks, I think that's the best answer: I just found today you can do that without requiring the other person to have a google account.

I had got dropbox, but shared files coming in from all directions put it over quota, and I didn't want to do that to others.

One issue I've found with Dropbox is if the person with the paid version shares a folder with lots of files with a person who has the free version, it could put that person over their limit. Has happened to me when receiving large TIFF files for mapping purposes.

Yeah I've given up delivering files into clients' dropboxes because of this.

Agree. Same problem here. Its a cunning business model. And most of the reviews point out they are not cheap.

...and that's precisely why I don't want to use dropbox. Also, the recipient has to sign up to dropbox, which isn't the case for googledrive, which is why others don't want me to use dropbox.
Ah well, back to work to install yet another videoconferencing app. :(

I just place all the maps I work on in a subdirectory on my web server, https://tmsw.no/, if you go there you'll notice there's nothing in the home dir. :-)

The open maps I've made of the Hvaler archipelago
https://tmsw.no/hvaler/ and the sprint map of the single island where our summer home is located https://tmsw.no/asmaloy/ are always available here for free use.

I have several gigabytes of base maps I've constructed, I just upload them and send the URL to the club who asked for it. Since my web host (dreamhost) allowed me to buy a 10-year subscription which includes unlimited web space, there's really no reason for me to delete old stuff or otherwise clean up anything.

Terje - that second URL is incorrect, should be https://tmsw.no/hvaler ;)

@bubo: Thanks! I think you meant the third URL, for Asmaløy, right?
Fixed it now. :-)

Pretty sure he meant the 2nd one, which is broken.

Terje, second link domain is incorrect, spurious o before tld.
And, nit-picking, subdirs should have trailing slash, else web server will first look for file in root and only then choose folder with that name.

Thanks guys, both urls were in fact bad, fixed now I hope!