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CartoDB is working great for dynamic maps, but I have a use case to render a totally static map, just an image online. Google offers its static map api. Afaik there is no similar API for CartoDB. But does anyone have a work around that would let me display a single, non-zooming non-panning image?
It'd be ideal if I could just put it in an html img tag, but something with javascript could potentially work. It'd be ideal if it's lightweight, as many of these users have very slow connections.
The best available library is Mapshot. It even allows you to apply rendering effects to the static image,
https://github.com/javisantana/mapshot
See the example running live here,
http://bl.ocks.org/andrewxhill/8323177
Edit: There was an interesting project from Al Jazeera America that used CartoDB and stored static maps on request
http://ajamsessions.tumblr.com/post/66114088651/displaced-syrians-map
That project was built using PhantomJS to create and store the screenshot on the server, see,
