MapTiler Engine basics: Tasks, Workflows, Task Queue

This page explains the basics of MapTiler Engine: How to create tasks, what are workflows, and how to speed up your work by putting the tasks in a processing queue.

Select a workflow

When you start MapTiler Engine, a task is created automatically for you, and you can choose a predefined workflow for the task according to your needs. These workflows are available:

  • Create tiles is the default workflow, activated automatically when you drop some files into the drag&drop area of the MapTiler Engine home screen. This workflow creates a complete set of map tiles (tileset) from your data. MapTiler Engine detects the type of data and walks you through the task settings that are relevant to the format of the input files:

  • Merge tilesets allows you to merge raster MBTiles, or replace parts of your tilesets with different data, which is handy if you need to update your existing tileset with new data.

  • Upload to cloud is available as part of the other two workflows, but you can also select it as a separate workflow if needed. It uploads a single tileset to MapTiler or your private cloud (Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage).

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Use the Task Queue

When you select a workflow and start configuring your desired output, MapTiler Engine creates a task.

Tasks were called projects in the previous versions of MapTiler Engine. If you have some projects saved, you can safely use them. They’ll work just like tasks.

Tasks can have their own unique configuration, different from the global settings, and can be saved with that configuration for later reuse.

To create and process multiple tasks, you can use the Task Queue. You don’t need to do anything special: Just select a workflow, configure the output, and start the task. This automatically creates a queue, and you can proceed to add more tasks to it.

Note that there’s a limit of 1 task in progress and 2 tasks in the queue, ready for processing.

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View the queue and task report

The Task Queue appears when you create a new task and submit it for processing. If you start creating another task, but you don’t want to finish it, you can go back to the Task Queue:

Use the Tasks button on the MapTiler Engine home screen.

Note that closing MapTiler Engine erases the Task Queue, so it’s no longer available when you reopen the application.

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To view the report for a specific task, go to the Task Queue and select Options > Task report.

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Cancel and save a running task

Rendering of your tiles may take some time. Ideally, keep the process running—if you put your computer to sleep and then wake it up, the task that was in progress will automatically resume. However, if you need to shut the computer down, all running and queued tasks would be cancelled. Here’s how to not lose your prep work:

  1. Go to the task queue and select Options > Cancel task.
  2. Then select Options > Save task to file to save the task and its configuration as an .mtp file.

To load a saved task, open your .mtp file in MapTiler Engine like any other input file, and start the processing again.