How To Use And Create Apple Maps Guides

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at using and making your own guide in the Apple Maps app on your Mac.

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So the Apple Maps app has this feature called Guides. You can view guides that already exist in the app. You'll see them come up when you search for certain places. You can also make your own. So, for instance, let's start off with a simple search and when I select Denver I could see here that it pinpoints that location at the center of Denver. But also, under information, I can see Denver Guides and there are a few here. So I've got Hiking Near Denver, Most Unique Hotels and Inns, and The Best Things to Do in Denver. You could see two of those are from a place called Culture Trip and another one is from Time Out. 

Let's see what Time Out thinks are the Best Things To Do in Denver. I'll click on that and you could see I come up with some pictures here. It gives me a description of this guide and I could scroll through it and see descriptions of places and photos. If there is some place in particular that I want to check out I can click on it and it shows me its location. Now if I like this guide and I want to keep it around I can click here and select Add To My Guides. Now in the left here under My Guides if I click to reveal that I can see that guide here. So I can add any that I find that I want to keep. The great thing this syncs via iCloud so on my iPhone if I look at the Maps app under Guides I'll find this one there too. 

There are also some other options here. For instance I can go to See Publisher's Guides and it will show me other guides from that same publisher. I could see all guides so I have a complete list. I can choose Editor's Picks or from specific locations. I can go to the Publisher's Website. I can also Share a link to this guide. Or send it to another device. iCloud should do that automatically. Now anytime I want I can return to this guide by clicking here and it will appear.

But you could also make your own guides. To do that first find a location. So let's say I want to make my list of things to do when somebody is visiting Denver. So I could search for something, like this, and it'll go to that and I could see here information about that. I can click here and say Save to Guide. Now I can select a guide I have created already or New Guide. Now it's going to create a new guide here and I can create this one. I could change the photo for it right here if I wanted to. But first let's add some more things. So let's go and search for some more things. You could see I could easily Save to Guide and there's my guide there. It adds that to the list. So I'll keep adding a few things. You don't have to search for things. You can actually find things on the map yourself and select them. So, for instance, I can select this location here and add it and I didn't have to search for it. Or I can Control click or two finger click on a location, drop a Pin in there and it will set it to a marked location. 

Now you can't name it right here. But if you go to Add it to the guide it will prompt you for a name and then when you save it to the guide there it's got that name. Now unfortunately that's all you could really do to customize these. It would be nice if you could add a description as well and it could look more like the guides that you get from other sources. But all you could really do here is add locations. So one thing you can do is instead of using the actual location a two finger click right next to it, drop a Pin, and then save that as a marked location to the guide and it will prompt me to add a name. Then I could add a short description instead of a name. But other than that the guide is really just a collection of locations. Note I can go and Sort them here by name, distance from my current location, or date added. Then, once you have a guide here you can select it, you could see all the locations there, you could click the i button here, and here you could change the photo. So I could select a photo from my images. I could also Control click on it or two finger click on it, and use Share and Share At a Link. So, for instance, if I choose Mail here it will open up a new Mail window with this link. It's a rather long link. So you may want to use an URL shortener or something. But look what happens if I select it and then use it in the browser. You could see it loads up in the browser without bringing up Maps. So this will work even if the person isn't on a Mac. Here I could to see Apple Maps when I get to select anyone of these locations here and it goes to it. Hit the x to go back. So now I can send this around when people ask me, hey I'm visiting Denver. Any recommendations of places to see. I can have this guide already to go. Maybe I could create one of my favorite restaurants. If I'm going on vacation somewhere I could go and look at some places that I want to go, maybe read some reviews of places, create my own guide and then have access to that just for me while I'm traveling. Or maybe while I'm traveling I can create the guide and then I'm able to send people a quick link to the places that I enjoyed when I was visiting that location.

In the iPhone you can go into the Maps app and access the guides there. You could find them here at the bottom under My Guides and then I could select one and I'd see a list underneath. I can sort them. I could jump to any one location very easily and even get directions right there. So it's handy to build this on your Mac and then use it later while you're on the go on your iPhone.