Lens Sharing Options

Overview

Lens provides two ways for you to easily and interactively share your impact with partners and stakeholders: Share Links and Lens Map Embedding. With the Share Link in Lens, you can provide a link to a single property with anyone, regardless of whether they have a Lens account. And with the Lens Map Embed, you can use Lens HTML code to include an interactive map on a web page like a blog post or website. 

These sources can be shared via Share Links and Lens Map Embedding:

  • USDA NAIP
  • ESA Sentinel-2
  • NASA/USGS Landsat 8
  • Planet NICFI (See Planet NICFI licensing here)
  • Planet Forest Carbon Diligence
  • Any overlay with the exception of parcel data
  • Commercial imagery is not available for sharing due to licensing restrictions

Both sharing options can be accessed by opening the Details pane on the left, where you will see the Sharing section. 

To generate a Share Link or a Lens Map Embed, click the "Share Property Map" button, which will display your sharing options. 

Sharing options created in compare mode include the compare slider, property name, source attribution, and map controls for this property only. 

Notes will not be shown in sharing options. Any overlays displayed when you generate the sharing options will be included in the shared map, but other non-displayed overlays won't be visible to external viewers.

Lens Share Link

Share Links create a new page that you can then send along to partners, landowners, consultants, investors, and more. Share Links are a stand-alone way of sharing Lens, as opposed to Lens Map Embeds which are meant to be included in existing websites or articles. See an example of a Share Link here.  

Share Links, as shown above, allows viewers outside of Lens to compare determined images, change the basemap, view 3D terrain and selected overlays, and zoom in/out.

Lens Map Embed

Lens Map Embed allows you to embed an interactive Lens pane directly into existing websites and articles, as seen below. 

Lens Map Embed showing truecolor NAIP images from 2018 and 2021

The embed code snippet can be copied straight from the sharing modal, just beneath the Share Link field. Once you paste the HTML code in to your destination of choice, the embedded map will include all attribution details for the layers in view. Like share links, the map won't include any notes, but it will show overlays if they're visible on the Lens application map when the embed code is copied.

Since embedded maps don't include legends, you can add descriptive content in the text surrounding the embedded map.

Additional information & tips about Lens Map Embed

We use an iframe HTML element for the embedded maps and recommend leaving it as-is under most circumstances. Below are a few details about how this works:

  • The iframe element will fill the container it's placed in so make sure to nest it within an appropriately-sized element on the page you're adding it to. <div>, <section>, <figure>, or similar HTML elements all work well.
  • Maps tend to look best when separated slightly from the surrounding context, so consider adding a small border, outline, or box shadow to the container element. This may depend on your page's styles though, and isn't necessary.
  • Consider adding a caption to the map to clarify what you'd like to communicate. You can do this by adding a <figcaption> element inside the <figure> container you added the iframe to.
  • The processing limit for Lens Map Embed is 16 simultaneous maps, across all tabs. Compare mode uses up two maps. If you exceed that value, your oldest map goes blank. Generally, it's best to avoid more than seven embedded compare mode maps on a single page.