How to Draw and Edit Shapefiles Online

Sometimes you don't have a file to start from — you need to draw one. A site boundary, a proposed route, a set of field-collected points. Or you have a file already, and it just needs a correction: a missing field, a mislabeled feature, a boundary that needs nudging. Both are normally desktop-GIS tasks. Neither has to be.

The problem with ad-hoc attribute fields

Most simple drawing tools let you add a custom field to whichever feature you're currently editing. It seems flexible, but it's exactly how spatial data quietly turns into a mess: one point gets a field called Population, the next gets pop_2024, a third gets Pop — three different names for what was meant to be the same piece of information. By the time you export, your attribute table is fragmented across features that don't actually share a schema.

Drawing from scratch

1. Pick a tool

   Point, Line, Polygon, or Rectangle, from the toolbar above the map. The same tool stays active after you finish one shape, so you can add several of the same type without re-selecting it each time.

2. Name it and add attributes

   Give the feature a clear name, and add whatever custom fields your data actually needs — they'll apply consistently to every feature of that type from then on.

3. Export

   Shapefile, GeoPackage, GeoJSON, KML, KMZ, CSV, or DXF. If you're exporting to Shapefile specifically, any field name over 10 characters is flagged and shown to you before you download — Shapefile's format has a hard length limit, and this way you're never surprised by a mangled field name after the fact.

Editing an existing file instead

Upload a CSV, Excel, GeoJSON, Shapefile, or GeoPackage, and its features load as fully editable shapes — move vertices, rename, re-attribute, or delete, the same as anything you drew from scratch. If the uploaded file already has inconsistent columns between rows, that gets normalized on load too, not just prevented going forward.

Working fullscreen

For longer digitizing sessions, press F for a distraction-free fullscreen workspace, Esc to exit — useful when you're placing a lot of features and want the map to take up the whole screen.