Adding and arranging icons

This guide shows you how to fill your icon set with icons, put them in the right order, and remove the ones you don’t need. All of this happens in the icon editor. If you don’t know how to open it yet, start with Managing icons.

Table of contents

1. Adding and arranging icons
   1. Preparing your icon files
   2. Adding icons
      1. Drag and drop
      2. The add icons button
   3. Selecting icons
   4. Arranging icons
   5. Deleting icons

Preparing your icon files

Icons are added from picture files on your computer. To look good on the map, your files should be:

• SVG or PNG files. SVG is the best choice, because it stays sharp at every size. Other file types, like JPG, can’t be used as icons.
• square
• with a transparent background

The name of each file becomes the name of its icon, so community-garden.svg becomes an icon named community-garden. If you name your files the way you want your icons to be called, you’ll save some typing later. Don’t worry if you get it wrong, you can rename an icon at any time.

For more advice on how your icons should look, check the Designing Icons guide.

Adding icons

There are two ways to add icons, and both of them let you add many icons at once.

Drag and drop

Select your icon files on your computer and drag them over the icon editor:

• If you drop them on an icon, the new icons are placed right next to it, in the same category. A line shows you where they will land: drop them on the left half of the icon to place them before it, or on the right half to place them after it.
• If you drop them on an empty space, they are added at the end of the set.

The add icons button

If you’d rather not drag files around, press the + (add icons) button in the heading and pick your files. The new icons are added at the end of the set.

Your new icons show up in the grid right away, while they are still uploading, so you can keep working.

Icons added at the end of the set don’t have a category yet. You can give them one from the Data tool, or simply drag them into an existing group.

Selecting icons

Click on an icon to select it. Its details will show up in the properties panel, with its name as the panel title.

You can also select more than one icon:

• hold Ctrl (or Cmd on a Mac) and click on icons to add them to the selection, or to remove them from it
• hold Shift and click on an icon to select every icon between the one you clicked last and this one

When several icons are selected, the panel title shows how many there are, and the changes you save are applied to all of them at once. This is handy when you want to move a bunch of icons to a new category, or give them all the same style.

To clear the selection, click on an empty space in the grid. The properties panel will show the details of the icon set again.

Arranging icons

The order of the icons in the grid is the order in which they appear in the map legend. To move an icon, drag it and drop it on another icon: on its left half to place it before, or on its right half to place it after.

If you drop an icon into a different category or subcategory, it moves into that group too. It’s the easiest way to organise your icons!

You can also change the category, subcategory and order of an icon by hand, from the Data tool.

Deleting icons

To delete icons:

1. Select the icons that you want to delete.
2. Press the Delete key (or Backspace) on your keyboard. Make sure you are not typing in a field of the properties panel, or you will delete your text instead.
3. You will be prompted to confirm the action:
4. If you press Yes, the icons will be deleted. Note that you won’t be able to recover them later.

Icons that are used by sites on a map, or by a survey, can’t be deleted. They stay in the set, and a message tells you which icons were kept and why. In this message, sites are called features: