From aerial photo to finished map in an afternoon

Get the photo

Most national mapping agencies publish orthophotos - top-down aerial photos with true distances - that you may use: PDOK in the Netherlands, IGN in France, the state geoportals in Germany. Recent ones are sharp enough to see individual hedges and caravans. Export the area of your site at the highest resolution available.

Check the license before tracing imagery from commercial map services - most do not allow it. The national open-data portals are the safe route, and their photos are usually newer than you expect. A drone photo of your own works too, as long as it is taken as straight down as possible; angled shots distort distances at the edges.

Then measure. Find the longest width and height of the site on the photo in meters and round up a little - you will need both numbers for the canvas, and it is easier to trim later than to discover the back meadow does not fit.

Terrain and roads first

Create a new campsite with the real width and height, upload the photo as a trace background, and lower its opacity to around 50 % so your own lines stay distinguishable from the photo underneath.

Work in layers of size: terrain first, then roads, then everything else. Paint grass everywhere, then the exceptions - sand, water, wood decks, hard standings. Draw the roads as paths with the right surface and width; junctions merge automatically. With terrain and roads done, the map is already recognizably your site, and everything that follows has an anchor.

Pitches, row by row

Make one pitch perfect before you copy it: correct size in meters, type, surface. Then duplicate along the row with Alt-drag - smart guides snap edges and centers, so the row stays straight without fiddling. A 20-pitch row takes a couple of minutes this way.

Select each finished row and renumber it from its starting number; set capacity and price for the whole selection at once. Resist perfecting individual pitches at this stage - rows first, corrections after, or you will spend the afternoon on one field.

Know what to leave out

Add the sanitary blocks, reception, playground, water points and the trees that matter for shade. Skip the rest: individual shrubs, the storage yard, the compost corner. Every object you add competes for attention with the pitch numbers - if it does not help a guest navigate or choose, it does not earn a place.

Check the result on a phone before calling it done: zoom out until the whole site fits, and see whether the roads, zones and sanitary blocks still read at a glance. That zoomed-out view is the one guests see first.

Publish, print, and keep it alive

Hide the photo - it is a tracing aid, not part of the shared map - and look at the result once more. Then share the read-only link on your website and in booking confirmations, and export a PNG for the reception board and the welcome folder, both from the same source, so they can never disagree.

The whole exercise took just under four hours for a site with 180 pitches: roughly half on pitches, a quarter on terrain and roads, the rest on facilities and second thoughts. The map is a live document from here - two lodges replace three tent pitches, you drag, renumber, save, and every copy is current.

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