Passage Data

Check a file →

View a shapefile online, without installing anything

Shapefile · GeoPackage

What you are seeing — you just want to LOOK at a spatial file, and every answer you can find tells you to install a desktop GIS first.

The short answer

You do not need a GIS to look at a shapefile. Drop the zipped bundle into the viewer and it draws the geometry, lists the columns at full length, and states the coordinate system the file itself declares.

It also tells you what the file does not say — which is usually the part that matters. A shapefile that names no datum, or names one that is not WGS 84, looks completely normal and puts your data metres from where you think it is. We say so instead of quietly assuming.

A shapefile is several files, not one. The .shp holds geometry, the .dbf holds the table, the .prj holds the coordinate system. Zip the whole folder and send the zip — a lone .shp carries no attributes and no CRS, and no tool can invent them.

GeoPackage (.gpkg) works the same way and is a single file, which is why most advice now tells shapefile sufferers to switch to it.

What you will see

  1. The shapes. A picture drawn from the file's own geometry — not a map, and it says so: no projection, no scale, no basemap unless you ask for one.
  2. The columns, at full length where the format allows it. A shapefile caps field names at 10 characters, so bescherming arrives as beschermin. We name the ones that were cut; a GeoPackage has no cap.
  3. The coordinate system it declares, read out of the .prj (or, for a GeoPackage, out of the file's own SRS table).
  4. What we cannot tell you — the datum it never named, the character set nothing declared, the original spelling of a truncated column.
  5. Imagery, only if you ask. It is off by default and per file, because map tiles are fetched by your browser from a third party, which tells them roughly where your data is. Your file is never sent to them.
Open the viewer

Drop a zipped shapefile or a GeoPackage and look at it. Free until 1 September 2026, 00:00 UTC · no account · your rows are discarded after the check.

Look at your file →

Why we can say that

5,064records already published to GBIF
0findings in GBIF's vocabulary
4,268findings from ours
31.7%came back clean

Measured on a file GBIF had already accepted and served — their validator asks will this load, and it had. Every figure is read from ops/data.json, never typed here. We issue no rating and no seal — each finding names the rule it applied.

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