Settings
The Settings dialog — appearance, caching, storage, beta features, API keys, map bounds and project presets
Settings opens from the cog in the sidebar header. Everything in it is a collapsible section, and the header's fold/unfold control collapses or expands all of them at once. Unlike most of the app, nothing here is in the URL: these are preferences for you, kept in localStorage, not settings you share in a link. (The one exception is Map bounds, which is shareable — see below.)
What's New — Changelog
The changelog inline, so a new release can be read without leaving the map. Opens by itself once after a version bump.
Appearance
- Transparent UI — the sidebar and panels become translucent over the map. Good for screenshots and for working on a small screen; slightly harder to read over busy imagery.
- Colour theme — light, dark, or follow the system.
Neither affects snapshots: the export composites the map and its pills, not the panel chrome.
Keyboard Shortcuts
The full list, rendered from the same source as the Keyboard Shortcuts page — one file, two places, so they cannot drift apart.
Visualization Modes
Reference copy of the visualization modes descriptions, again from the shared source, for looking up what a mode actually computes without losing your place on the map.
Streaming Settings
COG streaming behaviour — how aggressively remote COGs are read, and the Cache computed viz-mode tiles switch.
That switch is worth understanding: viz modes are computed per pixel in the browser, and MapLibre discards a source's tiles whenever the layer using it is hidden. Without the cache, toggling a mode off and back on recomputes everything — measured at about 1.2 s for LRM over a z13 viewport. With it, re-toggling is near-instant, at a cost of up to 96 MB. Turning it off also frees whatever is already held. Details in Tile Caches; the full page is Streaming Settings.
Browser Local Storage Persistence
Two independent switches over what survives a reload:
- Local COG files — remember local files between sessions. The file handle is kept, not the file, so the browser may still ask permission again.
- Vector layers (TerraDraw) — remember drawn and imported layers between sessions. See Tools.
Both default to on. Turn them off on a shared machine, or when a big local file is making startup slow.
Beta
Features that work but are not finished, or are expensive enough to be opt-in:
| Flag | What it unlocks |
|---|---|
| Tells (mound candidates) detection | the tells mode, plus Difference-of-Gaussians of the LRM, plan curvature / divergence and det-Hessian |
| Sun Shadow Calculator | the reverse-solve tool in Tools |
| Historical imagery sources | the historical timeline and its providers |
| STAC catalog search | the STAC search tab in both Add dialogs |
Defaults are { tells: false, sunShadow: true, historical: true, stacSearch: … }. Each flag is mirrored to a nuqs field (tellsBeta, sunShadowBeta, historicalBeta) which is what the app actually reads — so a link can enable one for a visitor without changing their own stored preference.
API Keys
One field per provider — Mapbox access token, MapTiler, HERE Maps, Planet, Cesium ion — stored in localStorage and never put in a URL or a shared link. Everything the app ships by default is keyless; these only unlock those providers' own basemaps and terrain.
The ion token is the one that gates a terrain source rather than a basemap: every Cesium ion asset answers 401 without it, so Cesium World Terrain and any private ion asset stay unreachable until it is set. A free token is at ion.cesium.com/tokens.
Keys are stored unencrypted in your browser, like any client-side app. Do not paste a key with billing exposure you would not accept on a shared machine.
Map bounds constraints
How far you can pan and zoom out — a fence around whatever is loaded, so you cannot drift off a national dataset into empty world.
| Mode | Fence |
|---|---|
| None | released entirely |
| Terrain (default) | the terrain source's footprint |
| Raster | the basemap's footprint |
| Union | both together |
| Custom | numbers you type, used exactly |
An automatic fence is never tighter than about 1° (~110 km) even when the dataset is much smaller. A single survey's own footprint makes an unusable cage: measured on an 8 km site, zoom-out stopped at z10.9 and panning was pinned to the site, so the valley around it could never be seen. Custom bounds are your own numbers and are never widened.
This one is shareable, as maxBoundsMode (and the custom tuple) — see Embedding & URL parameters. The mechanics are in Map Bounds and Underzoom.
Save Project Preset
Captures the current configuration as a named preset — hidden panels, initial state, bundled sources — for the ?project= parameter. See Projects.
Resources
Two reading lists rather than settings: MapLibre GL features this app leans on, and the topography, geomorphometry and hydrology literature behind the visualization modes.