Create Interactive Image Maps with Thinglink

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A while back, I had shown various ways to create HTML image maps. They are great, however they do have certain drawbacks. Like there’s no way for a user to know which parts of an image are clickable without hovering the whole image, another downside is that one cannot know where exactly a hot spot is linked to without actually clicking on it.

To eliminate those inconveniences, there’s a new online tool called Thinglink that makes your static web images interactive with rich tooltips.

With Thinglink, you can tag an image with text, music, video, pictures and people, and your readers would be able interact with the embedded item without even leaving the page. rich tooltips are shown for content from Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Amazon, Spotify, Vimeo, Wikipedia, SoundCloud and Twitter.

I have tagged the below image, which is the same I had used in the earlier mentioned post, with Thinglink. Try hovering over each logo.

Just like an HTML Image Map, in Taglink you define an area on the image that you would like to link to and when a user hover on any of the hotspots, they can see the linked content, or portions of it, in the tool tip itself.

To use this service, you must connect your site, blog or Flickr account with the Thinglink platform. Once done, you get an embeddable code to make all or individual images taggable. Thinglink works on most common publishing tools, including Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress (self hosted) and even on individual web pages.

Another useful feature that Thinglink provides is statistics for each tagged image. If you go to your dashboard, you can see the total number of views, hovers and clicks on individual hotspots. If you want, Thinglink can also send you weekly statistics by email.

Thinglink Stats

All-in-all, an excellent easy to use service to enrich the content of a website, and did I tell you it’s free? Hit the below link to try it now.

Visit: Thinglink