Adding places to MKMapView using MKPlacemark

Swift version: 5.6

Paul Hudson    @twostraws    May 28th 2019

You can add places to any map view using the MKPlacemark class, and it’s different from adding regular annotations – the map view shows the whole address on the map, even from far away, so users can see important points easily.

Your address needs to be specified as a series of keys from the Contacts framework, so start by adding this import:

import Contacts

Now add the GPS coordinate and address for the placemark you want. This creates a coordinate and address for Fortnum & Mason in London:

let coords = CLLocationCoordinate2DMake(51.5083, -0.1384)

let address = [CNPostalAddressStreetKey: "181 Piccadilly, St. James's", CNPostalAddressCityKey: "London", CNPostalAddressPostalCodeKey: "W1A 1ER", CNPostalAddressISOCountryCodeKey: "GB"]

You can then wrap that up inside an MKPlacemark instance like this:

let place = MKPlacemark(coordinate: coords, addressDictionary: address)

Finally, add that to your map view. MKPlacemark conforms to the MKAnnotation protocol, so you use addAnnotation():

mapView.addAnnotation(place)

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Available from iOS 3.0

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