Put your photographs on a map, and tell their stories.
MIRL Map is a free, friendly tool for documenting a place through photographs. You pin each photo to the spot where it was taken, give it a caption, and add as much or as little writing as you like. The result is two things at once:
- an interactive map people can explore, clicking any photograph to read about it, and
- a photo essay they can read straight through, from the first image to the last.
It was built for people in the arts, humanities, and cultural heritage: curators, archivists, scholars, artists, librarians, and community historians. You do not need to know how to code to use it.
The project comes with a small sample map already filled in, so you can see how everything works before you add anything of your own.
A few examples:
- A walk through a neighborhood, past and present.
- The rooms and details of a single building or monument.
- An archaeological site or excavation, photo by photo.
- A memory map of a place that has changed or disappeared.
- An oral-history project, with voices pinned to the places they describe.
- A field survey, an exhibition, a residency, a pilgrimage route.
If it can be photographed and placed on a map, it can become a MIRL Map.
Every MIRL Map gives you two views of the same photographs and words:
The map. Your photographs appear as markers on a map of the area. Visitors pan, zoom, and click a photo to open it, along with its caption, your writing, and a link they can share. Nearby photos gather into tidy clusters, so even hundreds of them stay easy to browse.
The essay. The same photographs, read top to bottom like a long-form story, with a small map beside the page that follows along as you read. This is the slower, guided way through.
- Photographs know where they belong. Most cameras and phones quietly record the location of each photo. MIRL Map reads that on its own, so you usually do not have to place anything by hand. (No location saved in the photo? You can type it in.)
- Words, with proper sources. Write a caption and a narrative for each photograph. Note your sources, and they become tidy footnote-style links, plus a ready-made citation for the photograph itself in Chicago, MLA, APA, or BibTeX style.
- Search across every caption and every narrative at once.
- Optional layers you switch on as your project grows: a documented timeline, a statistics panel, first-person oral-history voices pinned to places, before-and-after historical photographs, historical map overlays you can slide side by side with today, and outlines of areas or routes.
- Open in more than one language, including right-to-left scripts such as Arabic.
- Accessible by design: larger text, a high-contrast mode, and reduced motion, all remembered between visits.
- Free to publish online, and it stays simple. Visitors need nothing but a web browser.
You turn features on only when you want them. A brand-new map is just your photographs and your words. Everything else waits quietly until you reach for it.
There are two ways to add content, whichever suits you better:
1. A simple web editor (the gentle way, recommended for most people). MIRL Map includes an editor page where you log in, drag in a photograph, type its caption, write its narrative, and click Publish, much like filling in a form. No files to touch, no code. This editor needs a one-time setup by someone comfortable following the steps in ADMIN-SETUP.md; after that, anyone you invite can use it.
2. Editing small text files. If you would rather, each photograph is just a short text file you can edit, and your map's settings live in one place. The Content guide walks through every field in plain language, with examples you can copy and paste.
Either way, your changes appear on the live map within about a minute.
To be upfront: putting your map online for the world to see takes a one-time setup that is a little technical. You give the project a free home on GitHub (a well-known place that hosts projects like this and serves them as a website at no cost), and switch that hosting on. It is a handful of steps, written out plainly in ADMIN-SETUP.md, and it is the sort of thing a tech-comfortable colleague, or the MIRL team, can help you do once.
After that, the part you do again and again, adding photographs, captions, and stories, is the easy, non-technical part.
Would you like to try it on your own computer first, before publishing anything? You can. The "Try it locally" steps are in ADMIN-SETUP.md.
- You own your content. Your photographs and your writing are yours. You set whatever permissions and license you wish, and nothing is locked inside someone else's platform.
- It is portable and lasting. A MIRL Map is just photographs, plain text, and a web page: formats that will still open years from now, on any host.
- It is free to run. No subscriptions.
- Content guide is how to fill in your photographs, captions, narratives, sources, and the optional layers, one field at a time.
- Admin setup covers the web editor and how to publish your map online.
- Settings file is the single file that holds your map's title, where it opens, and which features are on. Look for the "EDIT ME" notes.
If you get stuck, the MIRL team is glad to help.
MIRL Map is made and maintained by the Material / Image Research Lab (MIRL) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It grew out of a documentary map of the village of Lifta and was generalized so that anyone can tell the story of a place. The map itself is drawn using OpenStreetMap and Esri imagery, and the code is openly commented for anyone who would like to look under the hood.
The MIRL Map platform, meaning its code, styles, templates, and documentation, is released under the MIT License. You are free to use it, fork it, and adapt it for your own projects. The full text is in LICENSE.
The license covers the platform, not what you put into it. Your photographs and your writing stay entirely yours, to license however you wish. The sample photographs in this template remain the copyright of Jeff O'Brien and are included only as placeholder demo content, meant to be replaced with your own.
MIRL Map bundles one third-party component, leaflet-side-by-side (MIT), by Digital Democracy.