Plotting an interactive map with Google Collab and Folium

Link to YouTube walkthrough

Link to Google Collab notebook

This post will give you the basic skeleton to begin creating interactive web-based maps. We will be using Google Collab to demonstrate.

This is a follow up to the bulk geocoding post where we generated coordinates (lat/lon) from a CSV of street addresses.

Step 1: Install GeoPandas

• We’ll be using the GeoPandas library to work with our spatial data

Step 2: Create GeoDataFrame and plot static map

• Once we create our GeoDataFrame (i.e. data frame that supports spatial data types and operations), we will plot our map using the native plot function.

Step 3: Import Folium and plot interactive map

• Folium is a Python library that wraps around Leaflet.js. With Leaflet, we can create a light weight interactive map in the browser.

Step 4 (optional): Download the html for the map

• If you want, you can download the html for our map and use it wherever you want!

Step 5 (optional): Download the geojson file for the coordinates

• If you want to take the coordinate data and use it in other mapping software, you can download the data in geojson format.