A Tour of the New pmtiles.io

pmtiles.io is an open source viewer for PMTiles tilesets. It’s a great way to inspect tilesets before you publish them on your site or app. It’s also a simple way to share GIS datasets without coding anything - just upload your PMTiles to any cloud storage, set up CORS, and deep link to the file on pmtiles.io using embedded URL parameters.

pmtiles.io got a re-write! It now features:

• Light UI mode
• support for viewing TileJSON (ZXY endpoints) in addition to PMTiles. For example, inspect the vector tiles hosted at vector.openstreetmap.org.
• Drag-and-drop of local files
• Inspect raster tilesets

At the top of the site are three main tabs for Map, Archive and Tile.

The Map view

The primary view for looking at tilesets and JSON metadata. Zoom in, pan around, and deep link to a specific view using URLs. Powered by MapLibre GL JS. View vector features, color-coded by layer, labeled by their name tag:

Check Inspect Features to hover an individual feature’s tags:

The popup also shows geographic coordinates of the cursor, and includes a button linking to the Tile View.

The Tile View

The Tile view is for map developers that need to drill down into the details of vector geometry. View a single tile in isolation and scale it up to see detailed geometry, without swapping in new tiles. It’s a simple SVG rendering of a single tile powered by D3.js.

Use the top navigation to browse parent, child and neighbor tiles:

The Archive Inspector View

The Archive Inspector is for implementers of the PMTiles specification, and visualizes the low-level internals of a tileset as a tree structure.

Opening the inspector shows the root directory of the archive, the size of tiles or leaf directories, and summary statistics in the header.

Clicking a tile entry opens the Tile View, and clicking a leaf entry opens another directory panel.

On the right, the current directory is visualized on a globe, with tile entries represented as squares, and run-length encoded duplicate tiles represented as space-filling curves.

You don’t need to have a tileset ready to try the new pmtiles.io - a variety of example datasets are included:

• v4.pmtiles - vector basemap, the daily build from OpenStreetMap.
• flowers.pmtiles - raster overlay, a zoom 20+ small area of aerial drone imagery.
• places.pmtiles - POIs derived from Meta and Microsoft places, distributed by the Overture Maps project.