Getting started

Advanced Maps turns Obsidian’s Maps view into a photo album and a route map. Install the plugin, point a Base at some notes or photos, and the map appears. This page walks through both, and ends with a base file you can copy.

Requirements

Caution

You need Obsidian 1.13.1 or newer, with Bases turned on and the built-in Maps plugin installed. Advanced Maps adds to that Maps view; it does not replace it. Maps still draws the map, and still supplies its controls, markers, popups, and options. If the Maps view is missing, the extra features are skipped and Obsidian keeps working.

Install

Advanced Maps is in Obsidian’s community plugin store.

1. Open Settings → Community plugins.
2. If Obsidian is in Restricted mode, turn it off. Obsidian first explains what a community plugin can do on your device, then asks you to allow them.
3. Next to Community plugins, select Browse, and search for Advanced Maps.
4. Select Install, then Enable.

You can also read the store page on the web: community.obsidian.md/plugins/advanced-maps.

Installing a build the store does not have yet

• Release: copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from Releases into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/advanced-maps/, then enable the plugin.
• BRAT: add Jin1c-3/obsidian-advanced-maps as a beta plugin.

Open Settings → Advanced Maps to see the installed version and a one-sentence update summary at the top of the settings home. Expand the history below it to read earlier versions’ summaries; it starts collapsed. The full changelog link opens the detailed update record.

On mobile

The mobile app draws the same map: note markers with their icons and colours, GPX, GeoJSON, KML and TCX routes with direction arrows, photo thumbnails at the places their photos were taken, the tape measure, and inline ![[track.gpx]] maps with their statistics and elevation profile.

A phone has no mouse, so two words in this guide mean different things there.

• Long press wherever a page says right-click. That opens the map’s own menu, and a file’s menu in the file explorer.
• Tap wherever a page says hover. A tap opens a route’s popup and moves the elevation profile’s cursor. Two taps go further than a hover did: tapping a note’s marker opens that note instead of previewing it, and tapping a photo opens the photo itself, which carries Open note inside it.

An offline basemap draws here too, read from the device’s own storage.

How a Base becomes a map

A Base is an Obsidian file that collects the notes and files you filter for and shows them as a table or a map. Its filter is the boundary of your map: whatever the filter matches is what can appear on it.

Advanced Maps then adds more. Each matched note brings the tracks and photos it links to. A photo or track file can also be a Base result in its own right, which is what makes a whole-folder photo album possible.

The snippet below is a complete .base file. Save it as atlas.base in the root of your vault, replace the two folder paths, open it, and choose its map view. You can keep editing the filter and the view options in the Bases interface.

filters:
  or:
    - file.inFolder("places")
    - file.inFolder("assets/onedrive/Pictures")
views:
  - type: map
    name: Atlas
    coordinates: coords
    trackWeight: 4
    trackOpacity: 85
    fitMaxZoom: 16

The first branch takes notes from a folder and turns each note’s coords property into a marker. That property sits in the note’s frontmatter — the properties block at the top of the note. The second branch takes photo files directly. JPG, JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, HEIF, and AVIF are supported.

“Every photo” means every photo that carries a location. A camera stores that location inside the photo, as EXIF data. A photo with no location stays in the Base results but gets no marker, because nothing is invented for it. A photo with a location but no usable embedded thumbnail still gets a plain dot.

View keys added by Advanced Maps

The last three keys in the example are options Advanced Maps adds to the Bases interface, under Tracks and Coordinate system. Leave them out and the map follows your plugin settings instead.

Key	Option in the view	What it does
trackWeight	Line width	How thick a route line is drawn
trackOpacity	Line opacity	How transparent a route line is
fitMaxZoom	Max zoom when fitting	How far automatic framing may zoom in
coordSystem	Tile coordinate system	Blank follows the plugin default

Where to go next

• Photo maps — map a photo folder, or the photos your notes link to.
• Tracks and areas — choose between a normal link and an inline map.
• Around and navigation — set up one Base for note navigation.
• Coordinates and services — fix a basemap that sits a few streets off, or open a place in another map app.