Thank you so much. I have a few more questions. 1) My continent PNG is stretching and distorting, as well as mirroring itself at the equator. How do I prevent this? 2) How do I move it around like you do in the gif? 3) Can you show what the mix nodes would look like as I add more continents?

sure, what questions?

I edited my original comment. I hit 'enter' for a new line, not to send the comment.

For additional continents, just add another MixRGB before the Principled BSDF ans so on. For the other questions, could you please share your file? pasteall.org/blend

mega.nz/file/…

For the Shrinkwrap constraint, activate Align to Normal > Z. For the stretched image, it's probably because you need a square image, crop it in an image editor like Photoshop or Krita

Thank you. The continent no longer stretches or distorts because of that change, but an additional copy appears on the polar opposite side of the sphere, no matter where I move it.

yes you're right, I didn't realize the problem, i'm going to check vklidu's file

so actually his method doesn't fix the problem you're pointing out, I need to see how to fix it, maybe unvote my answer for the moment

so the solution may be more complicated, or you could simply shrinkwrap your image on the surface of the globe?

could you share your file with the continent images?

You could project each continent texture on another sphere that is transparent and that overlaps the globe, would it fit your needs?

another solution would be to use a continent mesh that you would stick to the surface with a Shrinkwrap modifier + Shrinkwrap constraint

I actually think there is still distortion, but the default size of the image is small enough to not be noticeable. It's like it's stretching the image on the sphere, not wrapping it. There's gotta be a way to put a single image on a sphere, right? Isn't this program used to make professional-level stuff? There has to be a setting somewhere.

The end result I need is the ability to create a map projection.

of course it's professional, the problem is some things that may seem very easy to do are actually pretty hard

I propose another solution that is not as elegant as a one-texture-only proposition but it should work, it consists on using several sphere that you put over your globe, you can bake a texture from that

Unfortunately I just don't think Blender is the right program for this. It's so frustrating that there's no mapmaking program out there.