Drop a hand-drawn world map, a texture or any photo — it wraps onto a rotating 3D globe you can spin, light, tilt and export. 100% in your browser.
Drag to rotate · Scroll to zoom
JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF or SVG · up to 50MB · stays on your device
No upload, no signup, no watermark.
Everything runs client-side in WebGL — the image is never sent to a server.
A 16:9 sketch, a square canvas or a 2:1 texture — the fitter pads, stretches or crops it to 2:1.
Add a latitude and longitude grid, a movable sun with a day-night terminator, axial tilt and clouds — or leave them off.
Put the globe on nothing, a colour you pick, or deep space. The choice drives every export, so a transparent globe PNG really carries alpha.
Drag to orbit, set the spin speed and tilt the axis to check your world from every angle.
Save a still, record a clip, or render a seamless looping GIF — all encoded on your own machine.
No account, no credits, no watermark and no export limit.
If you are here because maptoglobe stopped answering: maptoglobe.com went offline during 2024, and it took a lot of half-finished worlds with it. This is a free maptoglobe alternative — a globe creator built for the same job — drop a map, texture, photo or artwork and it is wrapped onto a 3D globe you can spin, zoom, light and record — no install, no account, no export limit. The parts people actually used are here: a surface image at any aspect ratio, a graticule, a movable sun with a day-night terminator, an axial tilt slider and a cloud layer. What is different is where it runs. The whole map to globe pipeline is client-side WebGL, so your map is never uploaded and never attached to an account — if this page vanished tomorrow, the file on your disk would still be yours. Heightmaps, painting on the sphere and shareable globe links are not part of this tool today. Already have an equirectangular 360° photo and want to look around from inside? Use the 360° Panorama Viewer.
Same sphere, opposite viewpoint.
A globe wraps your map on the **outside** of a sphere — you look at it like a planet. A 360° panorama wraps an equirectangular photo on the **inside** — you stand in the middle and look around. Flat map, texture or photo and you want a spinning world? Use this tool. Equirectangular 360 shot? Use the 360° Panorama Viewer or the Photo to 360° Converter.
A sphere wants a 2:1 image, and almost no hand-drawn map is 2:1. Rather than refuse the file or silently squash it, this map to globe tool measures your image on drop and offers three ways to fit it. You can switch modes later in the settings panel.
Anything close to 2:1 — roughly 1.9:1 to 2.1:1 — skips the card and goes on the sphere untouched, where equirectangular world maps belong.
Your map is centred on a 2:1 canvas and the gap filled with a colour sampled from its own edges, so a 16:9 map gains empty polar caps instead of stretched continents.
The image is scaled to 2:1, so nothing is cut away. Coastlines widen or elongate: invisible on textures and abstract art, obvious on a drawn shoreline once the globe turns.
A centre crop to 2:1 holds your map at the scale you drew it. Use it when the edges are ocean or blank parchment.
Three steps, nothing to install.
JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF or SVG up to 50MB, read straight into the 3D scene — a vector world map from Wikipedia works as-is. If it isn't 2:1, choose pad, stretch or crop.
Drag to orbit and set the spin speed. Turn on the graticule to read latitudes, add clouds, or light the globe and tilt its axis.
Save a PNG still at a fixed 2048×2048, record a WebM clip, or render a seamless looping GIF of the globe turning — a transparent background keeps full alpha.
Worldbuilding on a flat canvas hides a problem: the equirectangular projection that wraps a rectangle onto a sphere stretches everything near the top and bottom edges. So the useful loop is draw, wrap, look, fix — drop the file here, spin the globe and see what the projection did to your continents. Nothing uploads, so a correction costs a second: fix the map, drop it in again, compare.
What to look at on the globe's first spin:
A map that isn't 2:1 still works: the tool measures the ratio on drop and offers pad, stretch or crop with a live preview. Pad is the default, adding a colour-matched border rather than distorting coastlines.
Yes — the day-night shadow is off by default. Realistic lighting is a toggle: the globe starts under flat, even light where the whole map stays readable, and switching it on adds a positionable sun, axial tilt and a terminator.
Open **More formats** next to Download and choose GIF: the globe is re-rendered offscreen one step per frame, so the loop is seamless, not a screen recording. WebM is in the same menu. Download PNG saves the globe at a fixed 2048×2048 — the same on every screen — and on a Transparent background it keeps full alpha, where the GIF only manages 1-bit.
No. The globe is rendered in your browser with WebGL, so your map never leaves your device and nothing is stored on our servers.
A flat image is wrapped equirectangularly, so its top and bottom edges compress toward the poles — normal for every image to globe tool. Keep key detail away from those edges, or let pad add polar caps.
maptoglobe.com went offline in 2024, and this globe maker covers the same job — a surface map on a spinning globe with a graticule, a sun and clouds — free and entirely on your own device.
Yes — this image to globe app is a browser globe creator with nothing to install. Drop any JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF or SVG and it is wrapped onto a 3D globe you can spin, light and download.
Any modern mobile browser with WebGL works — drag with one finger to spin the globe — and oversized maps are downsampled to a texture size your device can handle. The record button appears only where the browser supports it.