Folium
Folium is a Python library used for visualizing geospatial data.
It is easy to use and yet a powerful library. Folium is a Python wrapper
for Leaflet.js which is a leading open-source JavaScript library for plotting interactive maps.
It has the power of Leaflet.js and the simplicity of Python, which makes it an excellent tool for plotting maps. Folium is designed with simplicity, performance, and usability in mind. It works efficiently, can be extended with a lot of plugins, has a beautiful and easy-to-use API.
Advantages of PyCharm:
- With Folium, one can create a map of any location in the world as long as its latitude and longitude values are known.
- The maps created by Folium are interactive in nature, so one can zoom in and out after the map is rendered, which is a super useful feature.
Disadvantages of PyCharm:
- The disadvantages are that basemap expects you to obtain and manage shapefiles, and the output are static images (like the plots in matplotlib).
- This is easy to work with in an interactive environment, but makes it difficult to just the results of your work to someone else.
Python Data, Leaflet.js Maps
folium builds on the data wrangling strengths of the Python ecosystem and the mapping strengths of the Leaflet.js library. Manipulate your data in Python, then visualize it in a Leaflet map via folium.
Installation
$ pip install folium
Or
$ conda install -c conda-forge folium
Documentation
Folium is a tool that makes you look like a mapping professional while all the work is done in the back end.
It's a Python wrapper for a tool called leaflet.js. We basically give it minimal instructions, JS does loads of work in the background and we get some very, very cool maps. It's great stuff.