Any way to view a stripped-down Google Map (no landmarks, businesses, etc.)

Factual Questions
1

I am looking to view a Google Map of a city that leaves off the names of retail businesses, hotels, restaurants, and the like. Geographical names and street names are OK, but not required.

Is there any way to view a Google Map online with the labeling much reduced, if not eliminated?

We’ve got Google Earth here at the office, although not all the licenses appear to be equally powered. I know of no way to see any kind of street view in my version of Google Earth. Google Maps gives exactly the street view I need, just with a little too much clutter.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

2

Create a Google Maps API Key and you’ll be able to build a custom version where you can control how much data gets displayed, as well as your own data if desired.

3

Thanks, Dorjän. I found an online set of instructions, but it looks more involved than I’d hoped:

If an API Key is required, and there’s no stock way to do it through Google Maps itself … I will do a little Photoshop scrubbing. There’s only a handful of labels to remove, thankfully.

4

If you don’t need it to be “live”, but just need one map to show to people, I think your plan makes the most sense.

5

You can remove the labels using the “feature” parameter on the maps.google.com URL. Here’s an example:



https://maps.google.com/maps/api/staticmap?sensor=false&size=512x512&center=Sacramento&zoom=7&style=feature:all|element:labels|visibility:off

Of course you’ll want to set the size, center and zoom parameters to what you want. Keep everything after and including the “style=” to disable labels.

6

Weird, viewing my previous post on one computer displays the URL correctly, but on my phone it shows some of the ampersand characters as the string “& amp;”. If you see the latter, just change those 5 characters to a single ampersand.

7

I just wanted to make sure you knew there are quite a few other “slippy” map services besides Google Maps. I like the accuracy of wego.here.com, the look of Apple Maps and ArcGIS Webmap, the geographic boundaries shown on local.live.com, the open nature of openstreetmap.com and The National Map.

Here’s a list of various services you might want to look at before digging into modifying Google Maps.

8

Does it have to be Google Maps? Because with a little fiddling you can do this with OpenStreetMap. Combined with Maperitive, you can even get a nice vectorized graphic (like a SVG) where each independently visible layer has different features (roads, business names, etc.).

9

Are the “simplified road map” or “no labels” options at KMLMap what you’re looking for?

10

The “simplified road map” feature at KMLMap was exactly what I needed – thanks for the recommendation!

…

Mr. Downtown and psychonaut, thank you for your suggestions. I will compare different sites and see which ones seem the most suited for given future tasks. Nice to have a bigger toolkit.

markn+, I didn’t know about setting parameters in the address bar – thanks for that tip.