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Overview

Map Builder lets you fully customize and recolor a map's roads, water, land, buildings, and labels, then export the result as a high-resolution image. It is built specifically for architects creating site analysis diagrams, graphic designers building vector layouts, and artists printing custom map art.

The basic flow: pick a starting point (blank map or a preset), recolor whatever features you care about, optionally add your own lines, shapes, markers or photos (each with an optional click popup), then either export a high-resolution image or publish the map as a live, embeddable page. Styling the map is always free, with no account required.

Choosing colors

The Style tab (left rail) lists every map feature as a tree — Administrative, Landscape, Buildings, Points of interest, Road, Transit, Water, and Background. Administrative, Landscape, Points of interest, Road and Transit each expand into children (e.g. Road splits into Highway, Arterial, Local, and an Others catch-all for anything that doesn't fit a named category); Buildings, Water and Background are a single row each.

Click a row to select it — the right-hand inspector then shows its editable properties: Geometry fill/stroke, Label text fill/stroke, and Label icon color, each with a color picker. Changes apply to the map live. Buildings also has a Render mode (Fill or Outline) — Stroke width only does anything once Render is set to Outline. The small eye icon next to a row toggles that feature's visibility on or off. Selecting a parent category (e.g. "Road") colors all of its children at once; you can still override an individual child afterward.

You can also click directly on the map — clicking a road, water area or point of interest selects that same feature in the tree, so you don't have to hunt for it in the list first.

Presets

The Preset tab (left rail) has one-click color themes — 16 built-in options (Default, Night, Blueprint, Retro, Sunset, Pastel, and more), each shown as a live map thumbnail so you can see what you're picking before applying it. Tapping a preset card applies it to the whole map immediately. Presets are free for everyone. After applying one, you can still fine-tune individual colors from the Style tab — applying a preset doesn't lock anything.

Search & basemap

The search bar sits permanently expanded over the top-left of the map and lets you jump to a place by name or address instead of panning/zooming manually. The map icon next to it switches the basemap type — the default customizable Map, Satellite imagery, or Terrain — right there in the same floating toolbar.

Both search and Satellite/Terrain are Map Builder Pro features — a locked padlock means you'll need to upgrade to use them. Color presets are not affected by this — they stay free for everyone regardless of basemap type (though presets only apply to the Map basemap; Satellite and Terrain use fixed imagery that can't be recolored).

Measuring distance

Click the ruler icon (floating over the top-left of the map), then click points on the map to measure a path — a running total shows in a badge at the bottom of the map. Double-click to finish, or press Esc to cancel.

Zoom & level of detail

Zoom with your mouse wheel or your trackpad's normal pinch/scroll gesture — there's no separate on-screen zoom button. The level-of-detail icon floating over the top-left of the map opens a slider covering the full zoom range, labeled by the nearest named tier — City, Neighborhoods, Streets, Buildings — since a raw zoom number doesn't mean much on its own. This same detail level carries into the export flow, where it also affects how much a vector (SVG) export costs.

Label language

The languages icon next to the Style tab's "Features" title (left rail) opens a label-language list that switches what language place labels render in — English, Spanish, French, and several others, or the local name as OpenStreetMap has it.

Lines, shapes, markers & photos

The Overlay tab (left rail) is for drawing your own elements on top of the map — routes, boundaries, markers, photos, or text labels that aren't part of the base map data. Tap the + button and choose Polyline, Shape, Rectangle, Polygon, Circle, Star, Marker, Photo, or Text (a Section entry is also available, purely to organize a long Overlay list with dividers — it doesn't render on the map). Polyline and Shape are click-to-add-points (double-click or Enter to finish, Esc to cancel); Rectangle, Polygon, Circle and Star are drawn with a single drag; Marker, Photo and Text are placed with one click.

Once drawn, an element can be renamed, restyled (color, stroke width, opacity — plus an icon and size for markers, your own image for Photo cards, or content, alignment, bold/italic and rotation for text) or deleted from the Overlay list. A selected element shows a dashed box with corner handles — drag a corner to resize it, or the handle above the box to rotate it. Lines and shapes can also be edited node by node: drag a node to move it, grab a segment's midpoint to add a new node there, or right-click a node to remove it.

Marker and Photo card are really the same element with a different look — the Appearance tab's Type cards switch a selected item between the two any time, keeping its name, position and popup content.

Overlay elements ride into every export — free PNG, paid raster, and SVG — and are saved along with the map when you use Save to My maps.

Popups & click info

Marker, Photo and Shape elements each have a Popup tab (right panel, next to Appearance) for what shows up when a visitor clicks that element on a published or embedded map — the popup only appears there, not while you're editing.

The popup's title is always the element's name (rename it from the Overlay list or the field at the top of the right panel — there's no separate title field). Below that: a Details field for a short description (up to 500 characters), and a Photo for the popup — for a Photo card this can be a different image from the one shown on the map itself, set separately. Two optional buttons round it out: a Link button to any URL, and — for Marker and Photo only — a Navigation button that opens directions to that point. Both are on by default when there's a link to show, and can be switched off with their checkboxes.

Importing

The Import tab (left rail) brings outside content in three ways:

• Paste a link or style code — a Google Maps link, a style JSON/array (from the Google style wizard or a site like Snazzy Maps), or an old Google Map Customizer / Map builder share link. Map builder auto-detects what you pasted and applies the location, the style, or both.
• Drop a file — KML, KMZ, or GeoJSON. Its lines, shapes and markers land in the Overlay tab, where each one can be renamed, restyled or deleted like anything drawn by hand.
• Import a spreadsheet (CSV) — drop a CSV (e.g. a store or listings export) and Map builder auto-detects its columns, then lets you confirm or remap them: a location column (a street address to geocode, or a lat/lng pair) plus a name and any other columns you want carried into each marker's popup. Choose Marker or Photo mode up front, preview the result before committing, then import up to 2,000 rows at once — this is the fast way to turn a spreadsheet of locations into a store-locator map.

Save to My maps

The Save button (top bar) saves your current style, camera position and overlay elements to your account, so you can come back to it later from the My maps tab (left rail). This requires signing in — it's a private list tied to your account, not a public link. There's a limit of 20 saved maps per account; delete an old one to make room for a new one.

Collaborating

The Share icon — next to the map's name when it's open, or on its row in My maps — turns on a collaborate link for that saved map. Opening the dialog is what creates the link; anyone you send it to can join as an editor once they sign in, with every permission you have except deleting the map. You (the owner) see a Collaborators list under the link with a remove button per person, and can turn the link off any time — people already added keep their access, it just stops new people from joining. Editors see the same link and can copy it to pass along, but only the owner can manage collaborators or turn the link off.

While a shared map is open, small circles in the top bar show who else has it open right now, so you can tell you're not about to save over someone else's edit. Collaborating is a Map Builder Pro feature.

Style code

The code icon (top bar) shows the current style as raw code — either the Google Maps style array format or the MapLibre/OpenFreeMap style format — with a Copy button. Useful if you want to reuse a style outside Map builder, or paste it elsewhere via Import.

Exporting your map

Click Download (top bar), select the export area — drag a box on the map, or type its exact real-world width and length (m / km / mi), with an optional aspect ratio from the dropdown — then confirm the level of detail; the map previews it live as you adjust it. Finally, pick a format and output:

For screen (web, social, wallpapers) offers fixed resolutions. For print sizes the file by drawing scale instead: give it a scale (e.g. 1:5,000) and a quality (DPI) tier, and it tells you the physical print size and price — you print the file yourself at that size. Your selected area is never changed by these settings. PNG prices, screen or print, come from the same table:

The free PNG renders right in your browser and downloads immediately. Paid exports (higher-resolution PNG, or SVG) render on the server in the background — you don't need to keep the tab open — and land in My exports when ready. SVG exports are true editable vectors: named layers, real text labels, and any overlay elements you've drawn, all as scalable paths rather than a fixed-resolution image. See Free vs Map Builder Pro for how credits work.

Every export — free or paid — includes the required OpenStreetMap attribution baked in, so exports are safe to use commercially (prints, posters, products) without Google's licensing restrictions.

My exports

Paid exports (anything beyond the free 2K PNG) render server-side and show up in My exports, reachable from the account menu (top right). If your tab is still open when a render finishes, it downloads automatically; otherwise, come back to My exports and download it from there. Finished exports stay available for re-download for about a week.

Publish & embed

Unlike exporting a file, Publish (top bar) hosts your map as a live, interactive page at its own mapbuilder.app link — visitors can pan, zoom, and click your markers or photos to open their popup (title, details, photo, and any Link or Navigation button you set), and any later edit you publish updates that same page instead of creating a new one. It requires signing in, and works only on the default Map basemap (not Satellite/Terrain, which use a domain-restricted key that can't safely be embedded).

A published page is your saved map, published — there's no separate thing to name. The first time you publish a given saved map, tapping Publish does it immediately; after that, its status reads Working (the live page matches what's saved) or Outdated (you've changed the map since the last publish) — tap Publish again any time to push the update. Unpublish takes the live page down without touching the saved map itself.

The dialog's Links & Embeds tab gives you a shareable link and a one-line iframe snippet for your own website — paste the iframe once and every future republish shows up there automatically, no re-embedding needed. The Analytics tab shows daily views, clicks per overlay marker, and which sites are sending traffic to the page, so you can tell whether anyone's actually using it.

Free and Pro accounts can both publish; how many overlay elements (markers, lines, shapes) a published map can include is capped by tier, with Pro allowing more.

Free vs Map Builder Pro

Styling the map — the full color tree, presets, overlays, and a free 2048px PNG export — is free for everyone, no account required to try it. An account is only needed to save maps or spend credits.

Map Builder Pro is a subscription that unlocks place search, Satellite/Terrain basemaps, collaborating on maps with others, removes ads, and includes a monthly allotment of export credits. Credits are Map builder's currency for higher-resolution exports: they're spent on paid PNG exports (priced by resolution) or SVG vector exports (priced by area × detail level). You can also buy one-time credit packs without subscribing, if you just need a few higher-res exports and don't want search/satellite or ongoing ad-removal.

See Plans & credits for current pricing.

Managing billing

From the account menu (top right) or the Plans & credits page, Pro subscribers get a Manage billing link that opens Stripe's customer portal — from there you can update your card, view invoices, or cancel the subscription (it stays active through the end of the current billing period). Payments are processed by Stripe; card details never touch Map builder's own servers.

Contact us

Questions, bugs, or feedback — email mapbuilder.support@gmail.com.