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 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 the 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:
- Data-driven styling: You can use the style editor to assign styles based on your data's properties. Learn more about creating data-driven styles in the Mapbox Studio Manual styles section and our Make a choropleth map tutorial series.
- Filtering: As long as your data has properties that uniquely identify each of the original datasets, you can also use Mapbox Studio's filter functionality to create distinct style layers from a single tileset source. Learn more about filtering in the Mapbox Studio Manual styles section.
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 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.