Skip to main content

Source limits in Mapbox Studio styles

Styles made with the Mapbox Studio style editor or uploaded to your Mapbox account have a limit of 15 sources. If you try to add more than 15 sources to your style, you will receive the error message Failed to update style.

Check number of sources used

You can check the number of sources used in your style in the Mapbox Studio style editor. Open the style in the style editor, click on the sprocket Settings option in the top toolbar, and scroll to the Layer overview section.

Reduce the number of sources

There are several strategies you can use to reduce the number of sources you're using in your style.

Combine sources outside Mapbox Studio

The most effective way to reduce the number of sources you're using in a style is to combine data from multiple data files or tilesets into a single tileset. You can do this in several ways:

  • Mapbox Tiling Service: Use a multi-layer tileset recipe with Mapbox Tiling Service to create a tileset with up to 20 layers. Each layer can have a unique tileset source.
  • GIS application: Use a tool outside of Mapbox, such as QGIS or ArcGIS, to merge your geospatial data before you upload it to Mapbox.
  • Tippecanoe: Use our open source command line tool, Tippecanoe, to add multiple data files to a single tileset source, export to MBTiles, and upload them all at once to Mapbox.

Style combined sources

Once you've combined sources, there are a few different ways to style the data in the Mapbox Studio style editor:

Make sure source compositing is on

Sources used in a Mapbox Studio style are composited, or combined, by default. Source compositing does not reduce the number of sources counted toward this limit, but if source compositing is on, tileset sources that are not being used in any style layers will automatically be removed from the composite source.

To check whether source compositing is on, open your style in the style editor, click on the sprocket Settings option in the top toolbar, and scroll to the Source compositing section.

Remove an unused source

A source that is no longer needed can be removed from the style by deleting all layers using said source. To delete a layer dependent on a particular source, select the layer in the Layers panel and click the Delete button at the top of the panel. Note that not all layers can be deleted.

Was this page helpful?