Google Maps – How to Mark a Road as a Toll Road in Google Map Maker

This format works for a specific location, though the label seems to be limited to 1 character:

http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=40.698217,-74.05&zoom=13&size=600x300&maptype=roadmap&markers=color:orange%7Clabel:A%7C40.690217,-74.035&sensor=false

If you really want to show more than one character, you can get around the limitation in a rough way by specifying more points:

http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=40.698217,-74.05&zoom=13&size=600x300&maptype=roadmap&markers=color%3aorange%7Clabel%3aA%7C40.690217,-74.035&markers=color%3agray%7Clabel%3aS%7C40.680217,-74.033&markers=color%3agray%7Clabel%3aO%7C40.680217,-74.030&markers=color%3agray%7Clabel%3aM%7C40.680217,-74.027&markers=color%3agray%7Clabel%3aE%7C40.680217,-74.024&markers=color%3agray%7Clabel%3aP%7C40.680217,-74.021&markers=color%3agray%7Clabel%3aL%7C40.680217,-74.018&markers=color%3agray%7Clabel%3aA%7C40.680217,-74.015&markers=color%3agray%7Clabel%3aC%7C40.680217,-74.012&markers=color%3agray%7Clabel%3aE%7C40.680217,-74.009&sensor=false

You could actually spell out some long words this way, and according to Google, "Static Map URLs are restricted to 2048 characters in size", so you could generate a working link more than 3 times the size of the one just above and have fairly long "labels".

For the second example link, I just changed the first "label" letter to be at the edge of the frame south of the real point, gave every subsequent letter a small longitude change. All of this could be done programmatically if you are trying to generate many of these (you would have to look at the center lat and long and the zoom level to get the latitude of "just inside the frame south of the real point").

I started with the example here, and then verified that you can give a latitude and longitude for the map centre as well as the marker, and that you can set the marker to somewhere not on a feature and have it show up exactly as specified: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/staticmaps/#quick_example

(Note that the example given is for the Static Map version of Google Maps. Long labels may be easier to create for other versions.)

With the new Google Maps Engine you can do everything you want.

There is a tutorial that takes you through the basics of setting up your own map, but it does miss mentioning that in the information field of a pin you can add <img> tags.

You will still have to host those images somewhere else.

All maps are private by default, you have to share them in the same way as you do on Google Drive.