MBTileMakerViewer

Mobile devices require, and even desktop programs benefit from, maps that are divided into tiles for rapid and memory-efficient display across a huge range of scales. A very popular map tiling format is MBTiles, which was originally developed by Mapbox. My programs GMDE and GMDE Lite, as well as all GIS programs and mobile apps, can use MBTiles maps.

MBTileMakerViewer is, as the name says, a desktop app for making MBTiles files out of any raster map, as well as for viewing MBTiles files you may have received from others. The program has a very nice user manual, which you can access from the Help menu.

Version History

v. 1.5.0 — 2025.02.14 — Valentine’s Day edition!

  • NEW: You can now enter more than 3 control points. The app now uses a least squares best fit matrix inversion to determine the best fitting coefficients of the transformation matrix. After you’ve entered the first three control points, select Georeference>Add Another Point each time you want to add an additional control point.

  • NEW: Crop either your original map (before or after assigning control points) or your warped map so that your MBTiles file includes just the area you are interested in. No sense tiling parts of the map that you don’t want!

  • NEW: Set the color and transparency of the padding pixels used around the margin of the warped map. The default color is black but you can make the pixels white or any other color to blend in with the rest of the map. Making the pixels completely transparent is especially useful if you intend to save the MBTiles file in PNG format (which preserves transparency, unlike JPEG). When you overlay the map on a different base map in GMDE, the underlying base map will show through the transparent padding pixels.

  • IMPROVED: When showing, Apple Maps in the Mac version now shows the pins for the control points of the map you are georeferencing even if you are typing in longitude and latitude values instead of clicking on Apple Maps. NOTE: the value you type in is recorded when you have finished editing both longitude and latitude cells.

  • UPDATED: The user manual to reflect the above changes.

v. 1.0.1 — 2025.02.08

  • Minor interface refinements, especially to the MBTile map panel.

v. 1.0.0 — 2025.02.05 First public release!

  • Please read the manual for functionality. MBTileMakerViewer can read any map in TIFF, JPEG, or PNG format. If your map has an accompanying “World File” the app will use that to georeference the file. Otherwise, you will have to identify three points of known longitude and latitude on the map in order to georeference it.

  • Once georeferenced, you will warp the map to a Spherical Mercator projection which virtually all map tiles use. The Users Manual gives a good explanation of this projection and has a handy table to show you the relationship between zoom levels, equivalent paper maps scales, and resolution in meters per pixel. Once georeferenced, the app will use a simple and (relatively) speedy affine transformation with nearest neighbor interpolation to perform the warp. If your image requires more complicated warping, you will have to use some other program, at least until I get around to implementing higher order warps in a subsequent version. My experience is that this simple approach works very well in most cases.

  • After warping, simply choose File>Save as MBTiles File. to save your file.

  • Once a map is georeferenced, or if you have opened an MBTiles file that you already have, you can measure distances and azimuths on the map if you want.

  • That’s it: it’s pretty simple compared to the available alternatives!