How to modify zoom levels and rendering order in MapTiler Desktop Pro

This article explains how to define the range of zoom levels and rendering order in your project in MapTiler Desktop Pro according to your needs. We explained what the zoom levels are and how to adjust them in the Start/Plus editions of MapTiler Desktop in Modify zoom levels in Start/Plus.

Changing zoom levels

Globally

In MapTiler Desktop Pro, you still can adjust zoom levels quickly using spinboxes in the Output settings page, just as in Start and Plus editions, but only as long as all of your sources have the same native zoom levels and none of them has any zoom level explicitly set (either min or max). This setting will apply to all of your sources.

File-based

But what pushes the functionality forward in MapTiler Desktop Pro, is a separate dialog for setting zoom levels and rendering order, which you can get to by clicking the File-based zooms button. On this page, you can set zoom levels for each image. The current value of zoom levels for each image is shown next to it. To adjust the values, use spinboxes below the file list. You can change zoom levels for a single file as well as for a group of files at once, selected while holding Ctrl (Cmd).

On different tabs of the tab bar at the top of the page, you can find your files organized into the zoom level groups, which they will be part of in the output, and then the All zooms tab with all input files. This is useful if you have images on different zoom levels: here you can filter only images which are on specific zoom levels or zoom level groups (e.g. images with zoom levels 11-16) and also perform the setting on a filtered group of files.

Increasing max zoom by 1 or 2 zoom levels is available and preferred. Further increasing would result in a damaged image (over zoomed). When increasing the max zoom level, it is better to use the Cubic B-Spline resampling method from the Global settings.

Setting visibility

Another powerful setting that can be done on this page is changing the rendering order of your files: you can imagine this as visibility of the images in your output. This, naturally, makes sense to take care of only if you have overlapping images in your project.

The image which is highest in the table (has the lowest visibility index) will be the most visible one. The one which is just below will get the second-highest visibility … and the last image will be rendered as the bottom-most. So if you imagine MapTiler Desktop painting these images over themselves, it’ll start with one at the very bottom of the list and go up. The first image in the list will be the last painted and so the most visible.

To move the image above (or below) other ones, use visibility buttons under the table. In the example, I moved the nt27ne.tif image from its original position by clicking the Up button two positions up, so in the end, it will be rendered above nt27se.tif and nt27nw.tif. The same as for the zoom levels, more images can be moved at once either by clicking the corresponding button or by dragging&dropping one of the selected images.

Useful links

Zoomable map, resolution on specific zoom levels
Modify zoom levels in MapTiler Desktop Start/Plus
Changing resampling method in Global settings