Shapefile Viewer
Drop a zipped shapefile and see its geometry on an interactive map, inspect the attribute table, and export it as GeoJSON.
About Shapefile Viewer
A shapefile is not one file — it is a set of them. The geometry lives in .shp, the attribute table in .dbf, the index in .shx, and the coordinate system in .prj. They must travel together, which is why shapefiles are almost always distributed zipped. This viewer takes that ZIP and reads it directly.
The geometry is drawn on an interactive map and the attribute table is shown alongside, so you can check what a dataset actually contains before committing it to a project. You can export the whole thing as GeoJSON, which is a far more convenient format for web mapping and for anything that has to travel through an API.
Parsing runs in your browser, so government, commercial and client datasets under license restrictions can be inspected without transmitting them. One caveat worth stating plainly: coordinates are read as stored. Data in a projected coordinate system rather than WGS84 longitude and latitude will not land in the right place on the basemap — use the Coordinate Converter to check what you have.
How to use it
- 1Zip the .shp, .dbf, .shx and .prj files together if they are not already zipped.
- 2Drop the ZIP onto the upload area.
- 3Pan and zoom the map, and click a feature to see its attributes.
- 4Export as GeoJSON if you need the data in a web-friendly format.
Common uses
- Checking what is inside a shapefile before importing it into QGIS or ArcGIS
- Previewing a dataset on a machine with no GIS software installed
- Converting a shapefile to GeoJSON for a web map
- Verifying that a data delivery from a client contains the expected features
Frequently asked questions
Why do I have to zip the files?
Because a shapefile is a set of files that only works together. A .shp on its own has geometry but no attributes and no coordinate system. Zipping the whole set is the standard way they are distributed, and it lets the tool read them as one unit.
My features do not appear in the right place. Why?
Almost certainly a projection mismatch. If the data is stored in a projected system — a national grid or a UTM zone — the coordinates are metres, not degrees, so they fall far outside the basemap's expected range. Reproject to WGS84 in QGIS, or check the .prj to see what you have.
Is there a size limit?
The tool accepts ZIPs up to 50 MB, and the practical limit is your device's memory since everything is parsed and rendered locally. Very dense datasets with hundreds of thousands of vertices will be slow to draw regardless of file size.
Is my data uploaded anywhere?
No. The ZIP is unpacked and parsed in your browser. Only basemap tiles are fetched from the network, and those requests contain no information about your data.