Protomaps DocsCreating PMTiles
Tippecanoe
Tippecanoe is the supported tool for converting datasets into tiles. Tippecanoe version 2.17 and later supports direct PMTiles output.
An example of how to convert a Shapefile: US Census Bureau Tabulation Areas in two steps, using GDAL's ogr2ogr command line tool:
bash
ogr2ogr -t_srs EPSG:4326 cb_2018_us_zcta510_500k.json cb_2018_us_zcta510_500k.shp
# Creates a layer in the vector tiles named "zcta"
tippecanoe -zg --projection=EPSG:4326 -o cb_2018_us_zcta510_500k_nolimit.pmtiles -l zcta cb_2018_us_zcta510_500k.jsonogr2ogr -t_srs EPSG:4326 cb_2018_us_zcta510_500k.json cb_2018_us_zcta510_500k.shp
# Creates a layer in the vector tiles named "zcta"
tippecanoe -zg --projection=EPSG:4326 -o cb_2018_us_zcta510_500k_nolimit.pmtiles -l zcta cb_2018_us_zcta510_500k.jsonMBTiles
the pmtiles command line tool converts MBTiles to PMTiles with this command:
pmtiles convert INPUT.mbtiles OUTPUT.pmtiles
GeoTIFF
Using a file from OSGeo's GeoTIFF samples and the rio-mbtiles Python tool:
sh
# convert single-band to 3-band RGB GeoTIFF
gdal_translate -expand rgb input.tif input_rgb.tif
# in this example create 512x512 PNG tiles from zooms 0 to 16.
rio mbtiles input_rgb.tif output.mbtiles --format PNG --zoom-levels 0..16 --tile-size 512 --resampling bilinear
pmtiles convert output.mbtiles output.pmtiles# convert single-band to 3-band RGB GeoTIFF
gdal_translate -expand rgb input.tif input_rgb.tif
# in this example create 512x512 PNG tiles from zooms 0 to 16.
rio mbtiles input_rgb.tif output.mbtiles --format PNG --zoom-levels 0..16 --tile-size 512 --resampling bilinear
pmtiles convert output.mbtiles output.pmtilesGDAL
GDAL has native support for PMTiles starting with version 3.8.0 (2023-11-13), see gdal.org/drivers/vector/pmtiles for details.
Other
WARNING
This section is under construction.