# Amazon Location Service maps now let you choose which POIs show up, and how many!

Hey friends, it's Shii! Today I found a happy little update around Amazon Location Service's maps, so let me tell you about it right away!

## What was announced?

In AWS's What's New, Amazon Location Service announced that you can now filter the POIs (Points of Interest, the shops and spots shown on a map) by category and by density. Amazon Location Service is a fully managed service that helps you add maps, place search, routing, and tracking to your applications, backed by high-quality geospatial data.

With this update, you get two new query parameters on the `GetStyleDescriptor` API: `poi-categories` and `poi-density`. Together they let you control, server-side, which kinds of POIs show up on your map and how many of them appear.

## The story so far

Until now, every map style rendered all POI categories at once. If you wanted to narrow things down for your use case, your only option was a client-side workaround tied to internal style layer identifiers, a fragile approach since it depended on implementation details that could change on AWS's side at any time.

## What changes

Pass an allowlist of categories, like Food & Drink, Transit, or Accommodations, to the `poi-categories` parameter, and Amazon Location Service returns a style descriptor that includes only those categories. The `poi-density` parameter lets you tune how many POIs show up overall.

Because the filtering happens entirely server-side, there's no extra work required on the client. Web, mobile, and headless server-side renderers all get a correctly filtered map without any additional code.

Here are a few examples of what this unlocks:

- A property-listing site can surface only Accommodations-related POIs
- A logistics fleet app can show only Transit and fuel-related POIs
- A tourist map can highlight sights and Food & Drink spots

Being able to control exactly what shows up, and what doesn't, with just an API call is a small thing, but I think it's genuinely useful.

## Dive Deep

The original announcement also lists the regions where this is available right now:

- US East (Ohio)
- US East (N. Virginia)
- US West (Oregon)
- Asia Pacific (Mumbai)
- Asia Pacific (Sydney)
- Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
- Canada (Central)
- Europe (Frankfurt)
- Europe (Ireland)
- Europe (London)
- Europe (Spain)
- Europe (Stockholm)
- South America (São Paulo)
- AWS GovCloud (US-West)

The announcement doesn't go into the exact parameter value format or pricing, so if you want the details, check out the [Map features](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/location/latest/developerguide/maps-concepts.html#maps-concepts-features) page in the Amazon Location Service Developer Guide.

## Wrap-up

- Amazon Location Service now lets you filter map POIs by category and density
- The `GetStyleDescriptor` API gained two new query parameters: `poi-categories` (an allowlist of categories) and `poi-density` (how many POIs to show)
- Previously you got every category, or had to hack around it client-side using internal layer IDs; now it's all handled server-side
- Property listings, logistics, tourism, and more can all show only the POIs that matter for their use case
- This one's for developers building maps with Amazon Location Service, especially if you're building something use-case specific