Thursday, September 26, 2024

VersaTiles Free Map Tiles

map of Washington DC

Looking for a free, flexible way to create custom maps? You’re in luck! Having only recently discovered one free source of interactive map tiles in OpenFreeMap, I have now uncovered VersaTiles. VersaTiles provides a full open-source toolkit for creating and sharing map tiles, all powered by OpenStreetMap data - and with no corporate strings attached!

VersaTiles map tiles can be used in most of the popular mapping libraries, including MapLibre, by simply pointing the map to:

https://tiles.versatiles.org/assets/styles/colorful.json

At the moment Versatiles reports that "we can't guarantee 24/7 availability, yet". Personally, I think that is a small price to pay for a source of free map tiles. If you really need the security of a guaranteed service, then you probably should be using a commercial map tile service, such as Mapbox or Google Maps.

Like OpenFreeMap, the VersaTiles map can be styled in the Maputnik open-source visual editor. For example, the VersaTiles map currently doesn't appear to have place-name labels for countries. You could use Maputnik to import Country Name data and then add country name labels to VersaTiles. Then, by simply hosting the exported style JSON file, you could display a VersaTiles map with customized country place-name labels.

I have added VersaTiles to my growing demo of Free Maps. If you are interested in exploring more map tile providers, then you can explore the Leaflet Provider Demo list of map tile services.

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