Share a Map With a Read-Only Link

In this guide

• One link per saved map, read-only, opening in any browser with no account on the other end.
• What a viewer sees: the whole map you saved, not a flat picture of it.
• The lifecycle: 30 days, renewable without changing the address, revocable in one action.
• How to send one, and how to think about who ends up holding it.

Who this is for

• Search and rescue. A coordinator sends each team leader the sector plan before anyone leaves the staging area, and they read it on the phones already in their pockets.
• Milsim organizers. The op map goes out once, to everyone, gridded and numbered the way the briefing will say it.
• Hikers. The route, the camp, the bail-out point, sent to whoever is staying home and expecting a call.
• Military cadets. A land navigation course goes out to the whole platoon before the exercise: the start point, the checkpoints and the grid squares they will be quizzed on, on the same map the cadre built. Every cadet trains against the same references, and the cadre corrects one map, not thirty.
• Instructors. One gridded exercise map, published to a class, identical on every screen in the room.

What the person on the other end gets

Everything you saved on the map: the grid you chose, waypoints and objectives, routes and imported tracks, drawings and text, tactical, topographic and SAR symbols, radius rings, sectors and distance measurements. They pan and zoom it like any map, on a laptop or a phone, and they never create an account to do it.

Layers you hid before saving stay hidden for viewers. What they see is the map you decided to show. A viewer who copies the map to their own account gets the whole saved map, hidden layers included, so hiding a layer is not a way to keep it out of a copy; remove it before saving if it must not travel.

What stays with you

Overlay imagery, the GRG or reference image you pinned under the map, never leaves your device in the first place, so it is not part of a shared map. Backed-up overlays are coming for premium accounts. Your name is not shown to anyone who opens the link. Live data layers such as weather, contours and active fires are read fresh from their sources while you work, so they are not part of a saved map either, and a viewer does not get them.

How the link behaves

• One link per map. Not one per recipient, not one per version. Send the same address to as many people as you like.
• It shows the latest saved version. Fix a boundary an hour later, save, and everyone who reopens the link sees the fix. No second link, no second message.
• It lasts 30 days. Then it expires on its own, which is the right default for something you sent to a group chat once.
• Renewing keeps the same address. A link already sitting in someone's inbox goes on working for another 30 days.
• Stopping is immediate. The moment you stop sharing, the link opens nothing.

Send one, in three steps

1. Save the map to your account. A link points at a saved map, so this is the one thing that has to happen first. Sign-in is free and takes a moment.
2. Share it. Create the map's link and copy it. Every saved map has exactly one.
3. Send it however you normally send things. Message, email, a pinned post in the team channel. It opens in a browser, so it works everywhere.

Keep this in mind

Anyone holding the link can open the map. There is no password on it and no list of who is allowed in, which is exactly what makes it easy to send and exactly why it deserves the same care as a document link. Think about where it gets forwarded. When the exercise is over, the team is home, or the plan is stale, stop sharing.

FAQ

Build the map, open the map and save it, then send the link instead. Personal and non-commercial use is free; commercial use needs a paid license.