Roadmap tiles

Roadmap tiles are image tiles based on vector topographic data with Google’s cartographic styling. This includes roads, buildings, points of interest, and political boundaries.

Getting roadmap tiles

You can begin making roadmap tile requests after you get a session token. Because the session token applies to the entire session, you don't have to specify the map options with your tile requests.

The following code sample demonstrates a typical session token request for roadmap tiles.

curl -X POST -d '{
  "mapType": "roadmap",
  "language": "en-US",
  "region": "US"
}' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
"https://tile.googleapis.com/v1/createSession?key=YOUR_API_KEY"

You get roadmap tiles by making an HTTPS GET request, as shown in the following example.

curl "https://tile.googleapis.com/v1/2dtiles/z/x/y?session=YOUR_SESSION_TOKEN&key=YOUR_API_KEY&orientation=0_or_90_or_180_or_270"

In this HTTPS GET request, z is the zoom level (ranging from 0 to 22), and x and y are the tile coordinates of the tile you want to retrieve.

Note: Tile coordinates are not the same as geographic coordinates. For more information about tile coordinates, see Map and tile coordinates in the Maps JavaScript API documentation.

The orientation parameter is optional. Its value specifies the number of degrees of counter-clockwise rotation of the tile image. orientation is supported for roadmap tiles, and it's also supported for satellite and terrain requests with base imagery removed using "overlay": true, and with layerTypes set. Valid orientation values are 0 (the default), 90, 180, and 270.

The tile coordinate grid isn't rotated if you include an orientation value. For example, if you set orientation to 90, then the x coordinate still defines the left-to-right position of the tile, which in this case is from North to South on the map.

Zero-degrees orientation	90-degrees orientation

Example tile request

Consider the following example, which requests a single tile that contains the entire world. In this example, zoom level is 0, and the x and y coordinates are 0, 0.

curl "https://tile.googleapis.com/v1/2dtiles/0/0/0?session=YOUR_SESSION_TOKEN&key=YOUR_API_KEY" --output /tmp/example_tile.png

There is no response message from the server in this example. Instead, the tile downloads to a local file, with the following statistics.

  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  8335  100  8335    0     0  51471      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 54835

For information about response message headers, see Pre-Fetching, Caching, or Storage of Content.