Map data in the browser
A workspace for building and keeping vector data. Draw and edit geometry, bring in the files you already have, style features by what is in their properties, and share a collection with the people who need it. Nothing to install and nothing to reproject first.
- What you need
- A current browser and an account. The free tier covers up to 50 maps, 500 MB of storage and 1,000 API calls a month, and needs no card.
- Where the data lives
- In your Hiri account, so it is there on the next machine you sign in from and can be shared with your team. If you need analysis that never leaves your own computer, that is Hiri Desktop.
Drawing
Every geometry you need, and three kinds of circle
Points, lines, polygons
Click to place, click to continue, double-click to finish. Hold Option to snap to an existing feature, or Shift to hold a right angle.
Rectangles
Drag a box, for extents and study areas.
Circles
Three kinds, because they answer different questions: Mercator circles that look round on a web map, geodesic circles with a real-world radius in the units you choose, and degree circles measured in decimal degrees.
Lasso select
Draw around a group of features to select them, instead of shift-clicking each one.
Editing
- Move, rotate and duplicate features, singly or as a selection
- Add, splice and remove vertices; close an open polygon
- Cut holes into polygons as inner rings
- Split a line at a vertex, or divide a feature in two
- Merge a selection into one feature
A keyboard shortcut exists for most of it, and the full list is one keystroke away in the app. A quick switcher jumps between your maps without going back to the dashboard.
Geometry operations
The steps you would otherwise open a GIS for
- Buffer
- A buffer at the radius and units you give, around points, lines or polygons
- Simplify
- Fewer vertices at a tolerance you set, with the result previewed before you commit
- Combine
- Union, intersection and difference across selected polygons; convex hull around a selection
- Derive points
- Centroids, label points, or every vertex of a geometry as its own point
- Convert
- Polygon to line, when the boundary is the thing you need
Properties and appearance
The table and the map are the same data
Properties open as a table next to the map. Edit a value and the feature updates; select several features and edit the field once. Rename a key across a collection, or cast a column that arrived as text into numbers so it can be used for styling.
Colour features by any property, with ColorBrewer ramps in stepped or interpolated classes. Categorical fields are detected and offered as categories rather than a range. Features that carry simplestyle attributes of their own can be left to override the ramp.
Basemaps
Bring your own: an XYZ tile URL, a TileJSON endpoint or a MapLibre style. Layers stack with the opacity you set, and the style you build can be exported as an expression to paste into your own map code.
Import and export
Formats in and out, from a file, a URL or pasted text
Both directions
- GeoJSON
- Winding, bounding boxes, indentation and ids are yours to set
- GeoJSONL
- One feature per line
- KML and KMZ
- For Google Earth
- Shapefile
- Zipped, for ArcGIS and QGIS
- FlatGeobuf
- For large collections
- TopoJSON
- Shared boundaries stay shared
- CSV
- Longitude and latitude columns, or a WKT, GeoJSON or polyline column
- Encoded polyline
- The format routing APIs return
The map itself exports as SVG when it is headed for a document rather than another tool.
Import only
- GPX and TCX, from watches and handheld receivers
- Excel spreadsheets
- GeoTIFF
- Photographs, read from their EXIF coordinates
- GTFS transit feeds
- OpenStreetMap XML
- WKT, bounding boxes and pasted coordinate strings
The format is detected for you.
Drop a file and Studio works out what it is. For a CSV it asks which columns hold the geometry, and shows you what it will do before it does it.
Prompt to points
Describe what you want mapped, then check it
Write what you are after, optionally confined to the area on screen, and Studio returns named point locations with short descriptions. Twenty-five by default and up to two hundred in one go. Preview them, drop the ones that are wrong, regenerate while excluding names you have already seen, and save the rest into a collection.
- Points, not polygons or routes. It is a way to start a collection, not a substitute for a survey.
- A model is proposing places from what it has read, so treat the unverified ones as leads.
Each place is put to a geocoder.
Where the geocoder confirms it, the coordinate is replaced with the real one, an address is attached and the feature is marked verified. Where it cannot, the model’s own guess stays and the feature is left unmarked, so you can see which is which before you keep it.
Collections, teams and the API
Shared work, and a way in from your own code
Maps live in collections, and collections in folders. Each one is private until you make it public, at which point it can be handed to someone by link. Invite people into an organisation as owner, admin or member, and everyone works in the same data rather than in copies of a file emailed around.
Every account includes a REST API with keys you generate and revoke yourself. The reference is in the app, generated from the service’s own OpenAPI description rather than written alongside it, so it does not drift.
Limitations
What Studio is not for
- No raster analysis. Studio holds and edits vector data; Hiri Desktop computes land cover, change, water, burn severity and terrain from satellite imagery.
- It does not fetch satellite imagery or elevation for you. Bring a GeoTIFF if you need one on the map.
- It is a cloud product. Data you put in Studio is stored in your account; Desktop keeps its rasters and results on your own disk.
The free tier needs no card