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GEOJSON converter

A .geojson file encodes geographic features as JSON: geometries such as Point, LineString and Polygon, each optionally carrying a free-form properties object, usually collected in a FeatureCollection. It is the format web mapping actually runs on.

Private for supported formats — processed in your browser

Convert supported files

Runs on your device

Drop GEOJSON files here

Batch files can each use a different output. Nothing uploads for local conversions.

Working inputs include camera RAW, browser-local audio/video, PDF, CBZ/CBR comics, office documents, ebooks, markup, 3D models, structured text, images, and archives.

Where GEOJSON comes from

GeoJSON began as a community specification in 2008, written by developers who wanted geographic data they could consume in a browser without an XML parser or a GIS library. RFC 7946 standardised it in 2016 and made two consequential decisions: coordinates are WGS 84 longitude-then-latitude, and the earlier CRS negotiation was removed entirely — a deliberate simplification that ended a long-running source of silent misprojection.

How GEOJSON works

  • Coordinate order is longitude, latitude — the reverse of how people say it, and the single most common source of bugs.
  • RFC 7946 fixes the coordinate reference system as WGS 84; alternative CRS declarations were removed from the standard.
  • Geometry types are Point, LineString, Polygon and their Multi- variants, plus GeometryCollection.
  • Properties are an arbitrary JSON object, so attribute schemas are a convention between producer and consumer.
  • Polygon rings have a winding-order rule — exterior counterclockwise — that many producers ignore.

When to use GEOJSON

  • Rendering geographic data in Leaflet, Mapbox or OpenLayers
  • Exchanging spatial data between web services
  • Converting between GPS and GIS formats
  • Inspecting or editing spatial data as plain text

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • Parses with a standard JSON library — no GIS stack required
  • A fixed coordinate reference system removes a whole class of projection errors
  • Native to every web mapping library

Limitations

  • Verbose and large for dense geometry, with no built-in compression
  • Longitude-first ordering trips up nearly everyone at least once
  • No topology: shared borders are stored twice and can disagree

Compatibility

Read by Leaflet, Mapbox GL, OpenLayers, QGIS, PostGIS, GDAL and GitHub, which renders it inline. Novus Convert parses it locally and converts to GPX, KML, TopoJSON and WKT.

Geometry and the properties object are preserved. Styling is not part of the format, so a conversion from KML loses that presentation information rather than GeoJSON dropping it.

Convert GEOJSON to another format

Convert other formats to GEOJSON