This article is about the Proxi admin app at app.proxi.co.
Whether it's a historic walking tour, heritage trail, ghost tour, architecture walk, mural trail, or self-guided audio tour — the format is a numbered route people follow at their own pace, with a story at every stop. If yours currently lives on a paper brochure, this is the upgrade: richer stops, zero reprinting, and you learn which stops people actually visit.
1. Build the Stops
Create a new map — "Mill Town Heritage Walk." Add each stop by searching its address, or double-click the exact spot for markers, plaques, and building corners that don't have one. Have the old brochure's stop list in a spreadsheet? Import it. (See Adding Places to Your Map.)
Number the route: add a Short code field called "Stop," fill in 1–15, and switch on Markers → Numbers on markers. Numbered pins are what make it read as a tour.
Draw the walking route as a line in Shapes & Overlays so people always know where to head next.
2. Tell the Story at Each Stop
This is where digital beats paper hands-down. Each stop's description supports rich formatting — and embedded media:
Write the full story, not the brochure-length squeeze. Headings, bold, lists — the card scrolls.
Then-and-now photos: upload the archival shot and today's view to each stop's Photos.
Audio and video: use Embed a link as a card in the description toolbar to drop in an oral-history video or narrated audio clip — visitors play it right on the stop's card, and suddenly it's an audio tour with no app. (See Photos and Rich Descriptions on Your Places.)
3. Style It for the Subject
Map style (Display → Map style) sets the mood: Paper or Sketch for historic walks, Spooky or Night for ghost tours, Watercolor for garden and art trails.
In Branding: the tour name and a one-line subtitle ("A 90-minute walk through Mill Town's story"), your society's colors under Brand colors, your logo, and a period-appropriate Custom font — type does a lot of the atmosphere on a history tour.
Set the starting view to frame the whole route (Display → Default view → Fit to all places, then Set current view as default).
3½. Turn On Progress Tracking
The feature that makes a digital tour feel like a journey: in Point Card → Actions, turn on Mark as visited and make it yours:
Set the Button label and After-visit label — "I Was Here" / "Visited" — so checking off stop 7 of 15 is satisfying.
Check Replace marker when visited (with an optional custom visited icon) so completed stops visibly change on the map.
Turn on Show visited filter so walkers can hide what they've done and see only what's left.
Set Get directions to walking mode, and leave upvotes and comments off unless you want visitor stories on each stop — Point comments (titled "Reviews" by default, on Pro) can collect neighborhood memories on a history tour, which is its own kind of archive.
4. Put It Where Walkers Are
QR plaques at the stops — a small weatherproof QR at stop #1 (and ideally every stop) lets anyone who stumbles onto the trail join it mid-route.
Set the Save to home screen name and icons in the Sharing section — a tour someone saves to their phone feels like an app, with no download.
Print the paper version people still love: Print & Export with the list sorted by Point number and the QR on the map page. (See Printing Your Map.)
Embed it on your society's website, and turn on List Publicly so the tour is findable in search.
5. Ghost Tour and Event Variants
Running it as a seasonal event rather than an evergreen trail? Add a Date & time field for guided-tour departure times, or make it a game: a Scavenger Hunt where each haunted stop is a clue, or a Passport with photo check-ins at every mural. Multiple tours in one town — historic, food, art — can each be their own map built from the same collection, filtered by a "Tour" field.
Worth a read on the Proxi blog: from paper to Proxi — transforming walking tours, walking tours for your city, creating ghost tour walking guides, the power of numbered points, and a real example: how the Rainier Valley Historical Society mapped Mount Baker's history.