Creating 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.json

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.json

To merge multiple pmtiles files into a single file use tile-join tool, which is shipped with Tippecanoe

# Merge all PMTiles files in current folder into single file
tile-join -o merged.pmtiles *.pmtiles

# Merge all PMTiles files in current folder into single file
tile-join -o merged.pmtiles *.pmtiles

MBTiles

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:

# 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.pmtiles

GDAL

GDAL has native support for PMTiles starting with version 3.8.0 (2023-11-13), see gdal.org/drivers/vector/pmtiles for details.

Using ogr2ogr to create vector PMTiles is recommended only for smaller datasets: the tippecanoe tool creates much more efficient overview tiles.

GDAL's ogr2ogr tool supports a wide range of formats as input for creating PMTiles. Below are examples of generating PMTiles from a Shapefile or multiple PostgreSQL/PostGIS tables.

# Convert shapefile to to pmtiles
ogr2ogr -dsco MINZOOM=10 -dsco MAXZOOM=15 -f "PMTiles" filename.pmtiles my_shapes.shp

# Merge all PostgreSQL/PostGIS tables in a schema into a single PMTiles file.
ogr2ogr -dsco MINZOOM=0 -dsco MAXZOOM=15 -f "PMTiles" filename.pmtiles "PG:host=my_host port=my_port dbname=my_database user=my_user password=my_password schemas=my_schema"

# Convert shapefile to to pmtiles
ogr2ogr -dsco MINZOOM=10 -dsco MAXZOOM=15 -f "PMTiles" filename.pmtiles my_shapes.shp

# Merge all PostgreSQL/PostGIS tables in a schema into a single PMTiles file.
ogr2ogr -dsco MINZOOM=0 -dsco MAXZOOM=15 -f "PMTiles" filename.pmtiles "PG:host=my_host port=my_port dbname=my_database user=my_user password=my_password schemas=my_schema"

MAXZOOM=15 is sufficient for street-level mapping. Choosing less detail with a lower MAXZOOM will reduce the size of the final file.

Other

WARNING

This section is under construction.

Creating PMTiles ​

Tippecanoe ​

MBTiles ​

GeoTIFF ​

GDAL ​