Can you name 500 US cities and towns? What about 300 Canadian municipalities (cities, towns, villages, etc.)? For what you can name, can you picture their flags?

It’s not something a lot of people care for, to be honest. However, if you’re trying to find such information, teach it, or are just curious about it, there’s not a lot of nice information packages out there. By packages, I mean seeing a list, with flags, preferably with geography, something about the flags, and places, and maybe being able to download the flag, all in one place rather than having to do repeated searches for one or more of those things because whatever you had found, didn’t have it. Well, not any more!

Over the winter of 2023, I developed an interactive municipal flags interface to put over 500 US city flags and over 300 Canadian municipal flags on a map, with filters to show you which flags has what features, and descriptors to tell you all the features on a flag. Further, there are links to more information that is more a narrative and history of the flag, rather than data I generated in classifying the flag features to my own system, because I didn’t think there was a good one out there in the general public interest that could handle all the variety in flag designs I had found. I also included links to download the flag graphic, and the place the flag represents in case you wanted to know more about that.

In addition to municipal flags, I added the state and province/territory flags, and the two national flags to round out the set of Canadian and US flags. Now, there are a lot more than 500 US cities with flags, and you can see them on Wikipedia in lists (linked in the interface). However, they are not on a map, and don’t show the features. On the contrary, my Canadian municipal flag set is significantly bigger than Wikipedia’s one. However, it is much smaller than the Flags of the World (FOTW) site, though that looks like an interface from the early 2000s that’s not the most interactive or user friendly to navigate, despite all the great information they have to which I have linked via my interface. Seriously, if you want the next generation to be interested in flags, you’ve got to make it appealing to them!

Canadian Municipal Flags Interactive Flag Repository on Tableau Public

Despite my collection being smaller than some others, it is the biggest Canadian one you’ll find on a map, and it will be grown over the next few years as I find more time here and there to add more flags. And maybe also find some people to help in getting information while I do the adding tech and graphics work. But this set of about 900 flags is a good start, I think.