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bug: Default zoom level for px.scatter_map is too high #5450
Description
using some slightly modified examples in https://plotly.com/python/tile-scatter-maps/.
If I try (FYI need to install geopandas<1.0, note removal of the zoom setting):
import plotly.express as px
import geopandas as gpd
geo_df = gpd.read_file(gpd.datasets.get_path("naturalearth_cities"))
fig = px.scatter_map(
geo_df,
lat=geo_df.geometry.y,
lon=geo_df.geometry.x,
hover_name="name",
)
fig.show()Then I get:
Which is bad. We should set the Zoom to cover as many points as possible. Centroid on Africa seems reasonable for this example but not sure how it's determined.
Though I notice with some PX calls the centre point seems set automatically (note I removed the zoom level):
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.carshare()
fig = px.scatter_map(
df,
lat="centroid_lat",
lon="centroid_lon",
color="peak_hour",
size="car_hours",
color_continuous_scale=px.colors.cyclical.IceFire,
)
fig.show()Some investigation required to understand the current behaviour.
Activity
[-]Automatically set zoom and centroid for scatter tile maps[/-][+]feat: Automatically set zoom and centroid for scatter tile maps[/+]emilykl commentedon Dec 11, 2025
@ndrezn I'm moving this to the plotly.py repo since this seems to be a Plotly Express issue, not plotly.js.
This code:
produces a map centered on the centroid but zoomed in way too far, such that none of the data is visible:
Center and zoom info of the final plot:
However, it seems the root cause is bad defaults being added by plotly.py, since the equivalent plot in plotly.js is fully zoomed out and shows all the data: Link to Codepen
[-]feat: Automatically set zoom and centroid for scatter tile maps[/-][+]bug: Default zoom level for `px.scatter_map` is too high[/+]