Adding MapBox Geodata

The MapBox GeoData Library is a collection of free datasets that have been optimized to work well with TileMill and offer an excellent source for geographic data. For more details about the MapBox GeoData Library, see our technical reference.

For this guide, we’ll add a layer of populated places around the world.

1. Start TileMill and click on the Add project button.
   
2. Enter a name for your project and click Add. You can leave the other fields alone for now.
   
3. Click on the new project to open it. The project contains a default layer called #countries styled with some example CartoCSS code.
4. Click Add layer.
5. Enter cities in the ID field. You’ll use this ID to reference this layer.
6. For the Datasource field, click Browse to navigate to the MapBox GeoData library.
7. Click the MapBox button to navigate to the library.
   
8. Select the geodata file you would like to add to your project. Here we will navigate to natural-earth-1.4.0 - cultural/ - 10m-populated-places-simple.zip.
   
9. Click Done to confirm your selection.
10. Click the Save & Style button to add the layer to your project and insert a default CartoCSS rule for the layer.
    
11. Preview the result in the map preview pane.