Kerkia

Tiles Generator

Background

Google Maps and Bing Maps are served to web applications as tiles. This makes the rendering highly efficient when panning or zooming. Both providers can serve tiles to other applications and can also allow you to use your own tiles as an overlay to the underlying maps. While in some cases you may want to generate your tiles in code, in most cases it is just fine to prepare those tiles off-line using a utility. Such utility takes your layer as an image and help you geo-positioning it to then produce all tiles for all zoom layers you are interested in.

Recommendations

While a few tools exist for this, we found that Microsoft’s Map Cruncher is both easy to use and very efficient at producing tiles for you. It can also be used to produce Google Maps tiles; see http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9BBF4A21-DA3A-4AE5-924B-E22D6F360122&displaylang=en&displaylang=en.