Category: mapping

Calling all movie fans (which, after more than a year of periodic quarantine, is probably just about everyone). It’s not every day you had a chance to buy the house from The Silence of the Lambs. The infamous Pennsylvania home went on the market in September 2020. But it’s not the only famous movie filming location you’re able to step foot in.

There are hundreds of movie locations to pay a visit. Most are clustered in three states, one of which may surprise even the most dedicated movie buff. Or, if your interest is piqued based on the types of sets (outdoors locations, hotels, prisons, etc.) you’ll find those on the map below.

View Famous Movie Locations in a full screen map

We combined data from The Active Times and Cheapism to make the map. We also added Silence of the Lambs’ house for good measure—along with images. Now let’s see where most of these famous movie houses, transportation stations, hotels, etc. are located.

The Cities & States With the Most Films

While plenty of twists and turns took place in quite a few of these film spots, where they’re located isn’t too shocking. Unsurprisingly, most of the locations where films are shot are located in major U.S. cities like N.Y.C. and L.A., as you’ll see below.

• New York City – 10 famous film locations
• Los Angeles – 9
• Chicago – 5
• London – 4
• San Francisco – 3
• Philadelphia – 3
• Winnetka – 2
• Boston – 2
• Beverly Hills – 2
• Atlanta – 2

London, England, is the only international city home to multiple famous film locations on the lists we used. Those London locales include Selfridges from Love Actually, the Notting Hill Bookshop, Buckingham Palace in Paddington, and King’s Cross Station for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

A place we didn’t recognize as a major city was Winnetka, Illinois. Both Home Alone‘s McCallister house and Uncle Buck‘s New Trier Township High School are located in the small village 16 miles north of downtown Chicago.

States With Several Sets

For film aficionados interested in road-tripping to multiple locations where films are shot, several states have more than one. Those eight states are:

• California – 23
• New York – 10
• Illinois – 8
• Pennsylvania – 4
• Massachusetts – 3
• Georgia – 3
• Ohio – 2
• Hawaii – 2

It was easy to guess California‘s place on this list. After all, three Golden State Cities were mentioned in the previous section. We also previously discovered New York‘s sets are all in the Big Apple. As for Illinois, Winnetka claims two famous movie locations. That leaves five in Chicago (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off‘s Art Institute of Chicago, the Crain Communications Building in Adventures in Babysitting, and The Untouchables‘s Union Station are just a few examples). Finally, one film set in Woodstock (Groundhog Day‘s Cherry Tree Inn), which wraps up where these famous movie sets are located. Now, let’s move on to the various types.

Types of Well-Known Movie Locations

Famous movie locations are made up of residences like the Beverly Wilshire Hotel (Pretty Woman), the Mrs. Doubtfire house, and Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment. But more public landmarks like Tiffany’s jewelry store, Alcatraz prison, and King’s Cross Station also qualify. As such, these locations may be divided into nine types of well-known film sets, including outdoor locations.

There are 16 famous outdoor locations pinned on the map. Many of these valleys, coasts, and islands are located throughout Hawaii, including Kauai’s Hanapepe Valley, where much of the Jurassic Park franchise was filmed. Additionally, James Cameron’s Avatar took place off of the Big Island of Hawaii’s Hāmākua Coast.

Multiple movie directors preferred to film throughout Ireland. The Emerald Isle’s Skellig Michael island was a location of two Star Wars movies (The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi). Additionally, the Irish beaches of Ballinesker and Curracloe were featured in Saving Private Ryan.

Outdoor locations aside, categories of famous movie locations include:

• Hotels & residences (15)
• Entertainment & shopping (12)
• Palaces, plazas, & other landmarks (11)
• Museums & prisons (10)
• Food & drink (9)
• Education & religion (9)
• Transport (7)
• Cities & towns (4)

Select one or multiple groups on the map to see the famous movie locations that fall into the nine categories. Or, keep reading for how and why to add images to your maps.

Incorporate Your Images

The places you want to visit—including your favorite movie locations—are cluttering your Notes app or spreadsheet. Instead, transfer them to a custom map so you can see where in the world you want to go.

In addition to plotting your points, you can add images you find on the web or Pinterest to your map, reminding you of why you want to visit in the first place. Start mapping your bucket list locations along with your images today at batchgeo.com.

Put your finger on a globe and drag it across. Do you end up pointing at a horizontal or vertical line? These geographic coordinates are invisible on the actual planet yet used on maps and globes everywhere to pinpoint specific locations. However, sometimes these very helpful lines are in an unhelpful format. Whether you’d rather your latitude and longitude coordinates be in decimal degrees (DD) or degrees, minutes, and seconds (DMS), Excel makes it easy—no math required.

We’ll cover exactly how to convert the coordinates into decimals (or go from decimals to degrees) in a matter of steps. But first, you’ll want to ensure latitude and longitude are in individual columns.

Move Your Coordinates

Before you can convert your coordinate pair into the format you want, you’ll need to ensure latitude and longitude, along with the degrees, minutes, and seconds of each are in separate Excel columns. Why can’t we do this manually? Imagine you have 200+ rows of coordinate pairs. You need a way to select an entire column and separate its components at once.

One of the easiest methods is Excel’s ‘Text to Columns’. The tool enables you to identify a point in your text that Excel can separate for you. Let’s see how this popular Excel tool helps us manage our coordinates.

Use Excel’s Text to Columns to Separate Lat and Long

The first thing we’ll want to do is separate the coordinates into different cells. A geography reminder: latitude typically comes first, followed by longitude). To get started:

1. Select the cells you’d like to separate
2. Navigate to Excel’s “Data” menu
3. Select “Text to Columns…”
4. In Step 1 of the Text Wizard, identify whether you want to separate your data by Delimited characters (commas, tabs, etc between your data) or Fixed width (moving lines between the fields)
5. Step 2 is where you’ll determine the specific part of your text to separate (the Space in our example)
6. In most cases, you can click finish and be done

Amend your headings to better fit your updated data and the result is separated latitude and longitude coordinates. Now let’s apply the same steps to separate the degrees and minutes (and seconds if you have them!) of each coordinate.

Use the Same Tool to Isolate Degrees, Minutes, and Seconds

Now that we have latitude and longitude in different cells, we can separate our data even further. We’ll want to divide the coordinates into individual columns for degrees, minutes, and seconds. This will come in handy for converting into decimals later.

Let’s get started:

1. Optional As we delve deeper into Text to Columns, you may find it helpful to copy the character(s) already in your spreadsheet (like °) instead of scouring the web or your Excel menu for the Special Characters we often see with coordinates
2. Select your desired cells (either your new latitude or longitude column), ensuring there are a few columns to the right of either
3. Once again, navigate to Excel’s “Data” menu
4. Select “Text to Columns…”
5. Choose between the two data types in Step 1 of the Wizard
6. Determine what character or space to separate the degree (° in our example) in Step 2
7. Click Finish

Now that we have degrees set, we’ll do the same steps above to separate the minutes (′) and would repeat if our coordinates contained seconds.

There we have it! Simply replace the headings with something more apt and you’re good to move onto the next step: conversion. You can also discover even more Excel skills in our Simplify Complicated Data in Excel Spreadsheets post.

Convert Latitude and Longitude to Decimals in Excel

With your data in separate columns, there’s nothing to stop you from converting your coordinates to decimals. As noted in our Latitude and Longitude in Excel: Calculate Distance, Convert Degrees, and Geocode Addresses post, the formula for doing so is:

=Degree+Minute/60+Second/3600

To use it in Excel, follow the steps outlined here:

1. Add a heading (such as Decimal) to a blank column
2. Copy and paste the formula above into a cell under your new heading
3. Change the degree, minutes, and second placeholders in the formula to the corresponding cell number (i.e. A2)
4. Drag or copy the formula down the rest of the column

There you have it! Your DMS coordinates are now in a decimal format. But what if you want to transform decimal coordinates back to DMS? We’ll go over that as well.

Excel Decimal Degrees to DMS

If you need to reverse the change from DMS to decimal or you started with unwanted decimals, here’s how to go about it.

1. Select the decimal column
2. Navigate to Excel’s “Data” menu
3. Select “Text to Columns…”
4. Opt for Fixed width in Step 1 of the Text Wizard
5. Add a line before the decimal point
6. Finish

The first column now houses your degrees. As for minutes, take your remaining decimal and multiply it by 60 in a new column. Drag down to the rest of the cells.

If you were working with seconds, you would once again take only the decimal of the minutes and multiply it by 60 in a new column. You could then use =CONCATENATE to put it all together.

We’ve gone back and forth between degrees, minutes, seconds, and decimals. While we could continue to do this all day long thanks to Excel’s tools, there’s a better use of our time.

Visualize Your Lat + Long Points

After converting latitude and longitude to your desired format, your points are sitting pretty in your spreadsheet. But there may be a better place for your data.

With a custom map, you can visualize your latitude and longitude data and filter out what you want to see at any given moment. Take a look for yourself on our example map below.

View Top 100 Stores of 2019 in a full screen map

Zoom in and out of your locations with a double click of your mouse. Different colored markers represent the various values of your data. Get started with better data visualization today at batchgeo.com.

We all love our cats, dogs, and hamsters. But what about the animals we usually only see on the Discovery Channel? In-person viewing of wildlife can help educate and motivate animal lovers in conservation efforts. This is one of the goals of zoos, and in the United States, there are 439 of them.

But where in the country are the most zoos located? Ten U.S. states (and even some cities!) have many more than others, which means you might be able to visit two in one day. But not all zoos are the same. Zoos can be diverse in the type of animals they keep. See the familiar and unfamiliar zoo names for yourself on the map below.

View U.S. Zoos in a full screen map

The data for the map comes from Wikipedia’s list of zoos in the US. It includes some of the largest zoos in the US, including zoos of various types: safari and animal theme parks, aviaries, butterfly or other insect zoos, reptile centers, and petting zoos, as well as wildlife sanctuaries and nature reserves. Filter by the type of zoo that most interests you or stay tuned for where they’re located.

Most Zoos Are in These 10 States

While 439 U.S. zoos may seem like a lot, they’re not all evenly distributed across the country. Several states have at least 25 times the number of zoos than other states. Even select cities have more zoos than some states.

According to Wikipedia, Florida is home to the most zoos in the U.S. Thirty-one animal theme parks, jungles, and animal museums are located across the Sunshine State. Four of those 31 zoos are located in a single Florida city: Miami. There are also three in Tampa.

Additionally, both Texas and California have plenty of zoos to offer residents and visitors alike. Texas has 26 while 25 are located in California. Two more states have at least 20: Wisconsin (22)—where the city of Wisconsin Dells is home to three—and New York (20). Speaking of New York, five zoos are located in N.Y.C., though they’re all in different neighborhoods. Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, and The Bronx each have their own zoo.

On the other end of the spectrum, the entire state of Wyoming has just one zoo: the Kindness Ranch Animal Sanctuary. The state has no official zoo. Other states like Vermont and Rhode Island have only two. But what kinds of zoos are we talking about? Let’s take a look.

Safaris, Wildlife Sanctuaries, & Other Zoo Types

All of the 439 zoos contain animals and all are open to visitors (at least pre-pandemic). But some are marketed towards lovers of specific animals. For example, a safari zoo would attract more elephant aficionados than a farm zoo. Horse fans may prefer the farm option which is why we assigned a type to each zoo.

• Zoo – 175
• Park – 87
• Wildlife sanctuary – 47
• Museum, conservation, or nature reserve – 25
• Farm or petting zoo – 23
• Aviary, butterfly, or other insect zoo – 19
• Safari – 18
• Reptile or marine center – 17
• Lions, tigers, & bears – 14
• Animal theme park – 14

Of course, most are general city zoos (175). Of these, 15 are located in Texas. As for the types of zoos that appear the least, there are 14 animal theme parks. Four can be found in Florida: Busch Gardens Tampa Bay, Disney’s Animal Kingdom (in Bay Lake), Orlando’s Gatorland, and Lion Country Safari in Loxahatchee.

The rest of the animal theme parks are on a one-per-state basis and none can be found in the same city. But just because that’s the case with these types of zoos, doesn’t mean it applies to them all.

Hit Two Zoos in One Day

Several cities have multiple zoos. For example, Miami is home to Zoo Miami, Jungle Island, Monkey Jungle, and the Zoological Wildlife Foundation. Other cities like Wisconsin Dells and St. Louis also have many zoo options. To determine if you can visit two on the same day, do more than just eyeball how close they are. You can calculate distances between two addresses or points, (in this case, zoos) on your BatchGeo maps.

To do so, click the ruler in the top left corner of the map and select the measuring tool. From here, draw a line to each point and BatchGeo will let you know how far they are apart. For example, Miami’s Jungle Island is a little over 18 miles from Zoo Miami in the same city. These benefits are available to BatchGeo Pro users in Advanced Mode. Get started today at batchgeo.com.