Map Collections – Your Mission, Your Map.
About
From version 5.0
Map collections let you fully customize your maps—from the base layer to advanced overlays.
Start by selecting a base map provider. This can be a built-in online map like Apple Maps (street, satellite, or hybrid), with optional day/night styles and traffic information. You can also use added online sources or imported/downloaded offline maps.
Next, add map overlays. These can be additional online sources or offline maps that you’ve downloaded or imported. Each overlay supports adjustable transparency.
For offline overlays, you can also choose whether to show placeholder tiles. These are hidden by default. When enabled, placeholder tiles display Zoom/X/Y coordinates in areas where the required tile is missing and overzoom/underzoom handling isn’t applicable.
Complete your map with ground image overlays, each customizable in transparency for your collection. These are often custom maps—historical, event-specific, or for activities like paintball and field training—that you can quickly import and overlay with precision.
Here’s a breakdown of the map shown at the top of this screen:
- The map collection shown is named “NY Bay”. Its row in the maps list provides a clear, at-a-glance description:
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Base map: Apple Maps in street mode, day style, with traffic info enabled (see those red lines at 6:30am in NY!).
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A nautical offline map downloaded from the NCDS source (add it via: “+” > Online map source > URL library > NOAA Marine charts).
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A ground image overlay of a historical NY Bay map. Check out the stamp in the map corner!
💡 Did you know? You can download historical maps for almost any year/place in the U.S. for free: https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/viewer/#17/40.54093/-74.13782 Just navigate to your location, pick the map, and choose the KMZ option:
Don’t wait—download it, add it to your map collection, and go wreck or gold hunting!
Configuring.
Tap on a “map layers” button:
to open the map list screen and use ‘+’ button here:
Pick “Map collection” option:
The map collection screen is easy to navigate: choose a base map, add overlays, and layer in ground image overlays. Here is the configured map collection:
Save, then tap the map collection row in the map list to activate it.
If needed, adjust overlay transparencies later.
Notes
- When map collection is selected, you can’t activate image overlays from the map list - since image overlays are managed through the map collection in this mode.
- Image and map overlays in the map collection are removed from the map when the app goes into background. This is done to minimize the memory that the app takes in the background, so the foreground apps can use more memory and Apple have no reason to “kill” the app while it runs in the background when your iPhone experiences high memory pressure. So the moment the app returns to background you’ll see the maps being re-added, but it should take only a fraction of a second.
- To add online map sources and download offline maps use the ‘+’ button in the map list screen.
Related:
- See the map sources that you can add to the app to use online for downloading offline maps: Map sources library
- Learn how to download the Offline maps
- Find out more about Ground overlays
- Use the app for land/marine/air navigation: