How to draw a radius on the map
- Type the radius and pick the unit: miles, kilometres, metres, feet or nautical miles.
- Search a town or city, type coordinates such as 39.7392, -104.9903 or 39°44′21″N 104°59′25″W, or simply click the map. The circle appears with its centre marked.
- Drag the centre to move a circle. Click a circle's centre to select it, then drag the round handle on its right edge to change the radius, or type an exact value in the list under the map.
- Add as many circles as you need (up to 50). Each gets its own colour, and you can give it a label such as "Store 1" or "15-minute zone".
To draw rings around one point, type several radii separated by commas, for example 5, 10, 25, and click once. To place many circles, open Add many circles at once and paste one line per place: a town or coordinates, the radius, and a label, separated by semicolons or tabs, so a column copy from a spreadsheet works as it is.
The map works with a mouse, a touch screen (drag to move, pinch to zoom) and the keyboard: select the map, move it with the arrow keys, zoom with + and −, and press Enter to draw a circle (or set a measuring point) at the centre.
Reading the result
Under the map, each circle shows its area (in square miles and acres, or square kilometres and hectares), its circumference and its centre. A 5-mile radius covers about 78.5 square miles; a 10 km radius covers about 314 km². Area grows with the square of the radius, so doubling the radius makes four times the area.
Towns and cities inside a circle lists every place of 5,000 people or more whose centre falls inside, nearest first, with its distance and population, and downloads as a CSV file. It answers questions like "which towns are within 30 miles of the warehouse", but it is not a population count: villages are left out, and a town's population is for the town itself, not its suburbs.
Measure a distance gives the shortest distance between two clicked points along the Earth's surface, in your unit and in the other system, plus the bearing to set off on. It is the straight line a plane or a crow would take, not the road distance.
Why the circles are true to the ground
Most online maps, this one included, use the Web Mercator projection, which stretches the map more the further you go from the equator. A circle drawn as a fixed number of pixels is therefore the wrong size almost everywhere: at 60° north (Oslo, Anchorage) the real 100 km circle is twice as large on screen as the same circle on the equator. This tool never draws a pixel circle. It computes 180 points, each exactly the radius away from the centre along the Earth's surface, on the WGS84 ellipsoid that GPS uses, with Vincenty's formulas (accurate to well under a millimetre). Continental-size circles look egg-shaped and can wrap over the 180th meridian or around a pole, because that is what they really cover. For example, London to Paris measures 343.9 km, and a 100 km circle around a point at 60° N reaches 0.8975° of latitude north and 0.8976° south of it.
Saving, sharing and printing
- Share result makes a link that opens these circles for anyone. The link carries the circles themselves (centres rounded to about 100 m, radii, colours and labels), so nothing is stored on a server. A centre taken from your device's location is rounded to about 1 km.
- KML opens in Google Earth and imports into Google My Maps; GeoJSON works in QGIS, ArcGIS and most web maps. Circles that cross the 180th meridian are split, as the GeoJSON standard asks.
- Download PNG saves the current view as a picture with the map credits, and Print prints the map with a table of the circles.
Putting a delivery area on a flyer? Share the map, then turn the link into a code with the QR code generator. Got a photo taken somewhere you want to draw around? The EXIF viewer shows the GPS position stored in the photo, which you can paste here as coordinates.
Where the map comes from, and your privacy
This is the one tool on Meadow Tools that loads something from another site: the map images. They come from OpenFreeMap, a free map service that allows commercial use without keys or cookies, with map data © OpenStreetMap contributors and the OpenMapTiles schema. Like any online map, their server sees which area you are looking at; its privacy policy (checked 26 September 2026) says it keeps no IP addresses in its normal logs. Your searches, circles, labels and location never leave your browser: the list of towns (from GeoNames, CC BY 4.0) is downloaded from this site and searched on your device. Untick Load map images to work on a plain latitude and longitude grid with no request to OpenFreeMap at all.
Troubleshooting
- The map stays blank or shows a grid: an ad or privacy blocker, a school or office network, or no connection can stop the map images. Press Try again, or keep working on the grid: circles, areas, the towns list and exports don't need the images.
- My town isn't found: the offline list has towns of 5,000 people and up. Search a larger town nearby and drag the centre, or type the coordinates.
- Use my location is missing: it only appears where the browser lets this page ask for your location.