Mercantile

Spherical mercator coordinate and tile utilities

Documentation: http://mercantile.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

The mercantile module provides ul(xtile, ytile, zoom) and bounds(xtile, ytile, zoom) functions that respectively return the upper left corner and bounding longitudes and latitudes for XYZ tiles, a xy(lng, lat) function that returns spherical mercator x and y coordinates, a tile(lng, lat, zoom) function that returns the tile containing a given point, and quadkey conversion functions quadkey(xtile, ytile, zoom) and quadkey_to_tile(quadkey) for translating between quadkey and tile coordinates.

>>> import mercantile
>>> mercantile.ul(486, 332, 10)
LngLat(lng=-9.140625, lat=53.33087298301705)
>>> mercantile.bounds(486, 332, 10)
LngLatBbox(west=-9.140625, south=53.12040528310657, east=-8.7890625, north=53.33087298301705)
>>> mercantile.xy(*mercantile.ul(486, 332, 10))
(-1017529.7205322663, 7044436.526761846)
>> mercantile.xy_bounds(486, 332, 10)
Bbox(left=-1017529.7205322663, bottom=7005300.768279833, right=-978393.962050256, top=7044436.526761846)
>>> mercantile.tile(*mercantile.ul(486, 332, 10) + (10,))
Tile(x=486, y=332, z=10)
>>> mercantile.quadkey(486, 332, 10)
'0313102310'
>>> mercantile.quadkey_to_tile('0313102310')
Tile(x=486, y=332, z=10)

Also in mercantile are functions to traverse the tile stack.

>>> mercantile.parent(486, 332, 10)
Tile(x=243, y=166, z=9)
>>> mercantile.children(mercantile.parent(486, 332, 10))
[Tile(x=486, y=332, z=10), Tile(x=487, y=332, z=10), Tile(x=487, y=333, z=10), Tile(x=486, y=333, z=10)]

Named tuples are used to represent tiles, coordinates, and bounding boxes.

Mercantile CLI

Mercantile's command line interface, named "mercantile", has commands for getting the shapes of Web Mercator tiles as GeoJSON and getting the tiles that intersect with a GeoJSON bounding box.

$ mercantile --help
Usage: mercantile [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Command line interface for the Mercantile Python package.

Options:
  -v, --verbose  Increase verbosity.
  -q, --quiet    Decrease verbosity.
  --version      Show the version and exit.
  --help         Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  bounding-tile  Print the bounding tile of a lng/lat point, bounding box, or
                                 GeoJSON objects.
  children       Print the children of the tile.
  neighbors      Print the neighbors of the tile.
  parent         Print the parent tile.
  quadkey        Convert to/from quadkeys.
  shapes         Print the shapes of tiles as GeoJSON.
  tiles          Print tiles that overlap or contain a lng/lat point, bounding
                                 box, or GeoJSON objects.

See Also

supermercado is another python lib with added tile logic functionality (union tile shapes, find edge tiles, and find tile intersections for complex geometries).

node-sphericalmercator provides many of the same features for Node.

tilebelt has some of the GeoJSON features as mercantile and a few more (tile parents, quadkey).

morecantile is like mercantile, but with support for other TileMatrixSet grids.