Extract¶
To extract PMTiles, you need the pmtiles command line tool. You can easily download it from GitHub.
For macOS you can alternatively use Homebrew:
$ brew install pmtiles
Display meta information¶
You can use pmtiles show to display meta information for a base map in https://maps.protomaps.com/builds:
[1]:
!pmtiles show
pmtiles spec version: 3
tile type: Vector Protobuf (MVT)
bounds: (long: -180.000000, lat: -85.051129) (long: 180.000000, lat: 85.051129)
min zoom: 0
max zoom: 15
center: (long: 0.000000, lat: 0.000000)
center zoom: 0
addressed tiles count: 1431655765
tile entries count: 149402727
tile contents count: 129273806
clustered: true
internal compression: 2
tile compression: 2
vector_layers <object...>
description Basemap layers derived from OpenStreetMap and Natural Earth
pgf:devanagari:name NotoSansDevanagari-Regular
pgf:devanagari:version 1
planetiler:buildtime 2025-05-06T00:22:16.609Z
planetiler:githash 2c91725f6d048fd60b02d3e7c29bb88838451048
planetiler:osm:osmosisreplicationseq 111045
planetiler:osm:osmosisreplicationtime 2025-05-14T04:00:00Z
attribution <a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright" target="_blank">© OpenStreetMap</a>
name Protomaps Basemap
planetiler:osm:osmosisreplicationurl https://planet.osm.org/replication/hour/
planetiler:version 0.9.0
type baselayer
version 4.11.5
Extract an area¶
We can now create a subset of the planet file, berlin.pmtiles, containing only tiles that correspond to a corresponding bounding box.
Note
You can determine the bounding boxes of your area with bboxfinder.com, for example.
[2]:
!pmtiles extract https://build.protomaps.com/20250514.pmtiles berlin.pmtiles --bbox=13.088348,52.338245,13.761159,52.675508
fetching 10 dirs, 10 chunks, 8 requests
Region tiles 4337, result tile entries 4337
fetching 4337 tiles, 152 chunks, 49 requests
fetching chunks 100% |██████████████████████████| (84/84 MB, 4.7 MB/s)
Completed in 25.919422417s with 4 download threads (167.3262591734201 tiles/s).
Extract required 60 total requests.
Extract transferred 88 MB (overfetch 0.05) for an archive size of 84 MB
Alternatively, we can also extract the bounding box from a GeoJSON file:
[3]:
!curl https://tsb-opendata.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/bezirksgrenzen/bezirksgrenzen.geojson --output berlin.geojson
!pmtiles extract https://build.protomaps.com/20250514.pmtiles berlin.pmtiles --region="berlin.geojson"
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 1213k 100 1213k 0 0 3215k 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 3209k
fetching 10 dirs, 10 chunks, 8 requests
Region tiles 2481, result tile entries 2481
fetching 2481 tiles, 146 chunks, 55 requests
fetching chunks 100% |██████████████████████████| (68/68 MB, 4.4 MB/s)
Completed in 24.990571792s with 4 download threads (99.27744016743814 tiles/s).
Extract required 66 total requests.
Extract transferred 71 MB (overfetch 0.05) for an archive size of 68 MB
We can also only download zoom levels 0 to 6 and therefore only 813 kB:
[4]:
!pmtiles extract https://build.protomaps.com/20250514.pmtiles berlin.pmtiles --region="berlin.geojson" --maxzoom=6
fetching 1 dirs, 1 chunks, 1 requests
Region tiles 8, result tile entries 8
fetching 8 tiles, 7 chunks, 7 requests
fetching chunks 100% |█████████████████████████| (794/794 kB, 431 kB/s)
Completed in 6.001842375s with 4 download threads (1.332924033016977 tiles/s).
Extract required 11 total requests.
Extract transferred 813 kB (overfetch 0.05) for an archive size of 813 kB
View of the base map¶
pmtiles.io is a viewer for base maps. Click on Select file and then select the berlin.pmtiles file:
