What is geolibre?

GeoLibre Desktop is a lightweight desktop application for working with geographic data and maps. It sits in the category of GIS tools, which are applications that let you load, view, and analyze spatial data: things like maps of cities, terrain models, property boundaries, or satellite imagery. Unlike professional GIS software, which tends to be large and expensive, GeoLibre is designed to be small and open source. The app runs as a native desktop program on Windows, macOS, and Linux, built with a framework called Tauri that wraps a web-based interface into a standalone application. On the map side it uses MapLibre GL JS, an open-source mapping library, with OpenFreeMap as the default basemap. You can also run it as a plain web app in a browser during development. For loading data, the app supports a wide range of geographic file formats including GeoJSON, Shapefile, GeoPackage, KML, and several others. It can also connect to remote sources like XYZ tile servers, WMS services, ArcGIS layers, and cloud-optimized raster files. Once data is loaded, you get a layer panel to control visibility and opacity, a style panel to change colors and line widths, and an attribute table to browse and filter the underlying data records. The project includes a plugin system, and several built-in plugins are already available: a street view viewer (supporting both Google Street View and Mapillary), a LiDAR point cloud viewer, a drawing editor, and an AI-based agent called GeoAgent. For heavier processing tasks there is an optional Python server component that can be run alongside the desktop app. Projects can be saved and reopened in a custom file format. The code is MIT licensed.