Sharing a map

Three ways to export, chosen under Export as on the Map tab. Pick one, set Save to, and press Export in the top-right corner of the dialog.

Standalone HTML — the default

One file. Everything is inside it: the map, its styling and all of its data.

Send it, copy it to a USB stick, put it on a shared drive. The recipient double-clicks it. They need a web browser and nothing else - no QGIS, no account, no internet connection.

It is the largest of the three, and that is inherent to the format. Every feature is written into the HTML itself, because there is no sibling folder for it to live in - that is exactly what makes the file self-contained. A map whose data runs to 20 MB produces a file of at least that size.

Nothing in a browser objects to a large HTML file. What objects is email: most providers reject attachments over about 20-25 MB, and corporate filters are often stricter. The Map tab shows your map’s data size under the Save to field, and warns if it is over the limit - the file is still written if you want it. To make it smaller, untick Popups on layers that do not need them, or reduce Coordinate precision on the Map tab.

Share ZIP

The same map, zipped, with a short README explaining how to open it.

Worth choosing even when the file is small: many mail providers and corporate filters quarantine or strip .html attachments, because HTML is a common phishing vector. A zip usually passes filters that a bare .html does not. If someone says your map “never arrived”, try this.

Folder

For uploading to a web server yourself. You get a small index.html, the OnlyMap runtime as a separate onlymap.js, and a README. Splitting them is the point: a browser caches onlymap.js once and reuses it for every map on your site, instead of downloading the same few megabytes inside every page.

This one does not open by double-clicking it. Browsers refuse to load the runtime that way, so the folder has to be served over http:// or https://. A Standalone HTML export is the one that opens straight off a disk.

Which to pick

What the recipient sees

An interactive map: pan, zoom, toggle layers, click a feature to see its attributes.

If they preview the file inside an email client or a file manager - somewhere that does not run JavaScript - they see a short message telling them to open it in a browser, rather than a blank window.