Managing your icon sets
Icons come in icon sets where all icons are visually consistent. There are three types of icon sets:
- Catalog sets contain our default map icons. You cannot edit the sets (add, remove, or replace icons in them) but you can style the icons in any map that contains them.
- Custom sets are your own sets that you create and populate with uploaded icons.
- Migrated sets are only present if you uploaded any icons before we introduced individual icon management.
You can view all and manage custom icon sets in the icon set management section of Map Designer.
View icon sets
To see all icon sets across all your maps, go to the icon set management page. It’s accessible from any map:
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Open the Map Designer. It doesn’t matter which map is in the editor.
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Open the “hamburger” menu and click Icon sets.
Alternatively, if a map already contains icons, you can open the icon sets management directly from the Quick edits panel, section Map icons.
Warning
The icon management page is global and lists all your custom icon sets across all your maps. Editing a set here will affect every map where it is used, not just the one you’re currently working on.
Add icons
You can add icons only to a custom icon set. If the set already contains some icons, it’s either customizable or non-customizable. This can’t be changed later, so you’ll be only allowed to add more icons of the same type.
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On the icon management page, click the plus button to create a new (empty) icon set.
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Click Add icons. (Alternatively, you can upload an entire sprite.)
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Upload individual icon files or a ZIP archive:
- Vector icons must be monochrome and will remain customizable, meaning you’ll be able to style their color, outline, opacity etc. in your maps.
For multi-color vector icons, you need to switch off the Customizable icons (SDF sprite) option in the upload dialog. This is only possible when you’re uploading icons to a new empty set. If you need to upload additional vector icons that preserve their colors, add them to a raster icon set and they’ll be converted to raster.
- Raster icons get uploaded as a double-resolution (2x) variant, meaning they’ll render in half the size in the map.
To learn more about vector vs raster format and how we process it, see 👉 how to prepare your custom icons.
Swap sets
Swapping one icon set for another is a tricky action that may break your map. To avoid that, you need to make sure that both sets contain the same number of icons under the same names, or that the new set contains some extra icons, but none are missing.
If the new set doesn’t contain icons that are used in the map, then these icons don’t get replaced and disappear from your map. This can happen on any layer and might not be instantly visible. If you’re not sure, don’t swap icon sets.
Info
We recommend to only use the swap functionality to replace an old icon set with a new set to update the design, or in similar situations where you’re sure that both icon sets have an identical structure.
To swap one icon set for another:
- In the Quick edits panel, scroll down to section Map icons.
- Click on the icon set to open a panel listing all other icon sets available in your account.
- Click on the new set you want to use in this map. If there’s a 1:1 match, the sets are instantly swapped.
Other actions
On the icon sets management page, you can also duplicate, rename, or delete your custom sets: Right-click on a set and select the desired action.
The same applies to individual icons: it’s possible to rename icons, replace them, duplicate, delete, or copy between sets.