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mapview

Interactive viewing of spatial data in R

mapview provides functions to very quickly and conveniently create interactive visualisations of spatial data. It’s main goal is to fill the gap of quick (not presentation grade) interactive plotting to examine and visually investigate both aspects of spatial data, the geometries and their attributes. It can also be considered a data-driven API for the leaflet package as it will automatically render correct map types, depending on the type of the data (points, lines, polygons, raster). In addition, it makes use of some advanced rendering functionality that will enable viewing of much larger data than is possible with leaflet. Furthermore, if you’re a fan of mapdeck (which you should!), you can choose to use it as the rendering platform instead of leaflet by setting mapviewOptions(platform = "mapdeck").

The main user relevant functions are:

  • mapview - view (multiple) spatial objects on a set of background maps
  • viewExtent - view extent / bounding box of spatial objects
  • viewRGB - view RGB true- or false-color images of raster objects
  • mapshot - easily save maps (including leaflet maps) as html and/or png (or other image formats)

Functions that have been deprecated/deleted recently:

  • addHomeButton - deprecated, use package leafem instead.
  • addLogo - deprecated, use package leafem instead.
  • addFeatures - deprecated, use package leafem instead.
  • addMouseCoordinates - deprecated, use package leafem instead.
  • addExtent - deprecated, use package leafem instead.
  • addImageQuery - deprecated, use package leafem instead.
  • latticeView & sync - deprecated, use package leafsync instead.
  • slideView - deprecated, use package slideview instead.
  • cubeView - deprecated, use package cubeview instead.
  • plainview - deprecated, use package plainview instead.
  • popupTable, popupGraph & popupImage - deprecated, use package leafpop instead.
  • addLargeFeatures - use leafgl::addGL* functions instead.

Objects of the following spatial classes are supported:

  • sf
  • raster (Layer, Stack, Brick and SpatialPixels* / SpatialGridDataFrame)
  • stars
  • sp (Points, Polygons, Lines and their DataFrame version)
  • satellite

Installation

For CRAN release version of mapview use

install.packages("mapview")

To install the development version you can install the remotes package.

NOTE: As of version 2.9.1 development will happen on the master branch. Please consider the develop branch obsolete.

remotes::install_github("r-spatial/mapview")

Usage

The most basic call

mapview(breweries)

will produce a web map visualisation of the breweries data with the following components:

Contact

Please file bug reports and feature requests at https://github.com/r-spatial/mapview/issues

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Version

Install

install.packages('mapview')

Monthly Downloads

18,866

Version

2.11.3

License

GPL (>= 3) | file LICENSE

Issues

Pull Requests

Stars

Forks

Maintainer

Tim Appelhans

Last Published

August 28th, 2025

Functions in mapview (2.11.3)

show,mapview-method

Method for printing mapview objects (show)
renderMapview

Render a mapview widget in shiny
removeMapJunk

Delete elements from a map.
ops

mapview + mapview adds data from the second map to the first
mapviewOutput

Create a mapview UI element for use with shiny
mapviewWatcher

Start and/or stop automagic mapviewing of spatial objects in your workspace.
viewExtent

View extent/bbox of spatial objects interactively
trails

Selected hiking trails in Franconia
npts

count the number of points/vertices/nodes of sf objects
print,mapview-method

Method for printing mapview objects
viewRGB

Red-Green-Blue map view of a multi-layered Raster object
breweries

Selected breweries in Franconia
mapshot

Save mapview or leaflet map as HTML and/or image using webshot
mapView

View spatial objects interactively
knit_print.mapview

Print functions for mapview objects used in knitr
mapview-defunct

Defunct functions in mapview
mapview-package

mapview: Interactive Viewing of Spatial Data in R
mapviewColors

mapview version of leaflet::color* functions
mapview-class

Class mapview
mapviewOptions

Global options for the mapview package
franconia

Administrative district borders of Franconia