Change background tile with leaflet and R


This post shows how to change the background tile used by the leaflet R package. It provides an overview of the most common options with their associated code.

Background map section About Maps

Loading a tile

This post follows the previous posts on leaflet: most basic map, and zooming on a specific area.

Leaflet offers several tiles to customize the background used on a map.

A tile can be loaded thanks to the addProviderTiles() function.



# Load the library
library(leaflet)

# Note: if you do not already installed it, install it with:
# install.packages("leaflet")

# Background 1: NASA
m <- leaflet() %>% 
   addTiles() %>% 
   setView( lng = 2.34, lat = 48.85, zoom = 5 ) %>% 
   addProviderTiles("NASAGIBS.ViirsEarthAtNight2012")
m
 
# Background 2: World Imagery
m <- leaflet() %>% 
   addTiles() %>% 
   setView( lng = 2.34, lat = 48.85, zoom = 3 ) %>% 
   addProviderTiles("Esri.WorldImagery")
m

# save the widget in a html file if needed.
# library(htmlwidgets)
# saveWidget(m, file=paste0( getwd(), "/HtmlWidget/backgroundMapTile.html", width="1000px"))

List of tiles

Many tiles are made available. A complete list can be found here. Most famous are probably:

Related chart types
Map
Choropleth
Hexbin map
Cartogram
Connection
Bubble map



Contact

This document is a work by Yan Holtz. Any feedback is highly encouraged. You can fill an issue on Github, drop me a message on Twitter, or send an email pasting yan.holtz.data with gmail.com.

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