URLs
Connect to external map services and data sources using direct URL imports.
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Connect to external map services and data sources using direct URL imports.
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No files? No problem! You can upload any of the Upload Anything file formats directly as a URL to Felt by clicking the icon in the tools section of the toolbar or by directly pasting the URL onto your map (Cmd V / Crtl V).
Felt supports uploading data from publicly accessible URLs such as:
Google MyMaps
Google Sheets
XYZ Raster Tiles
Esri: FeatureServer, MapServer and ImageServer
OGC Web Services: WMS, WMTS and FeatureServer
Flat files: all of the file formats in this page, hosted at a URL
For example, simply paste the following URL to add country data from Natural Earth to your Felt map:
Import all the layers in your MyMaps directly into a Felt map by just copying and pasting the MyMaps link!
Make sure that your MyMaps share permissions have been updated so Anyone with this link can view is turned ON
Copy and paste the link directly in onto the map in Felt and click the Add to map option in the pop-up
Links to Google Sheets will behave just like regular spreadsheets and CSV files provided they are public. This means they must be viewable by anyone with the link.
Tiled raster services in XYZ (slippy maps) can also be imported as URLs. However, they must be imported as template URLs, which means the URL must contain the following parts: {z} (zoom), {x} (row) and {y} (column). Instead of the {y} parameter, {-y} may also be used to indicate that tiles are served in TMS format. They must also end in .png, .jpg or .jpeg.
Here’s an example raster URL of the city of Aberdeen from the National Library of Scotland:
Learn more in the Uploading Raster Data & Imagery page!
Ever found yourself on a page like this without knowing what to do? Many public data sources are only available as Esri MapServers or FeatureServers, which are hard to work with. Fortunately, you can simply upload the URL into Felt and let us do the work.
Felt supports two kinds of Esri server URLs:
URLs ending in a number (like /MapServer/0) point to a single layer in the server and will result in a single-dataset layer inside Felt. Example.
URLs ending in /MapServer (or /FeatureServer or /ImageServer) point to the whole server, which may contain many layers. Uploading one of these to Felt will result in a multi-dataset layer. Example.
Felt supports OGC URLs that point to public services from the following Open Geospatial Consortium standards:
Web Map Services (WMS) and Web Map Tile Services (WMTS): added as raster layers.
Web Feature Services, added as vector layers.
Felt displays tiles in the WebMercator projection (code EPSG:3857). For tiles from a WMS or WMTS server to be displayed in Felt, they must be served from a compatible TileMatrixSet, usually called GoogleMapsCompatible.
Users do not need to specify which TileMatrixSet needs to be used. However, if Felt does not find any compatible ones in the server, an error will be returned.
Felt will automatically try to parse and upload all layers from the service. However, Felt has a maximum of 50 layers per upload. If the service hosts more than that amount, an error will be returned.
For OGC services, users can work around this by specifying which layers to request in the URL query parameters:
WMTS and WFS: a single layer in the form of ?layer=X
WMS: one or more layers in the form of ?layers=X,Y
