During GIS project delivery, situations with weak or no network connectivity are frequently encountered. Typically, we need to manually download map tiles from various providers. Currently, there are numerous map downloaders available on the market, both free and paid. Upon closer thought, this process isn't particularly complex; it essentially breaks down into three steps: defining the area of interest, downloading all tiles within that area, and exporting. Therefore, while working on a project, the author searched for a simple, small-scale downloader and ultimately found one on GitHub: OfflineMapDownloader.
Project Introduction
Original Project Repository:
https://github.com/0015/OfflineMapDownloader
After testing, the author identified several significant issues, primarily in the following three areas:
- It only supports OpenStreetMap and ArcGIS Online.
- It does not support downloading tiles for regions in China.
- The downloaded
.mbtilesfiles cannot be opened in QGIS.
The issue with China regions was particularly critical, rendering the tool unusable for the author. Consequently, the author made some simple fixes and created a new version. The author's version repository:
https://github.com/sailor103/OfflineMapDownloader
This version primarily addresses the three aforementioned problems. It can now correctly export maps for Chinese regions and supports opening the files in QGIS, as shown below:
