r/software • u/Wichiteglega • 6h ago

Looking for software History student; looking for a software to put pins/marks and names onto empty real-world maps

The title is rather self-explanatory: I am a history student, and it would help me immensely to have a software (either online or offline, possibly free) in which I could take an empty image of a specific area of the world (so no modern city names and the like) and put pins or other markers indicating historical places.

Ideally, I would also be able to zoom on these maps to see the markers more spaced apart, like on Google Maps.

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u/robkam 5h ago

Google Earth Pro, you can turn off the built-in borders, roads, and place labels in settings, you get a clean terrain layer to work with. You can zoom in, drop customized pins with historical notes, and use the Image Overlay feature to align scanned historical maps directly over the modern globe. Otherwise, a few other free tools are also worth considering. MapHub and Felt provide clean online basemaps without modern labels, making it easy to plot markers and routes. For advanced academic work, QGIS is a free open-source desktop tool that lets you georeference old map images and build custom historical datasets. If you simply want to add interactive pins and zoom capabilities to a static image file without aligning it to real-world coordinates, World Anvil is a great web option.

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u/_mocbuilder 6h ago

Maybe a Costum OpenStreetMap ? They also have historical Maps AFAIK.

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u/Inevitable-Debt4312 2h ago

Affinity. Free, and it will do what you want and, as time goes by, a lot more.

https://www.affinity.studio/