Export Options Guide

Four buttons sit in the visualization toolbar. PNG, JPG and JSON come off the split button, and the Sitemap button beside it downloads an XML sitemap built from your crawl.

The thing to know before clicking any of them: the image exports capture what is on screen, not the whole map. Frame the view first.

PNG And JPG Capture The View

Both render the current viewport at twice screen resolution, so what you see at 1,400 pixels wide lands as a 2,800 pixel file. Anything scrolled off the edge is not in it.

PNG writes a white background. It is not transparent, so do not plan on laying it over a colored slide.

Neither format includes the HUD or the color legend. Those are page furniture sitting outside the map canvas, and only the canvas is captured. Node colors do come through, so whichever metric you are coloring by is what the file shows.

Between the two, JPG is the smaller file and PNG is the sharper one on text and thin edges. Use the visualization controls to set the view before either, and see best practices for what is worth framing.

JSON Carries The Whole Graph

JSON is the only export that is not a picture. It is the entire graph object: every node and every edge with its underlying data, the positions they are drawn at, and the current zoom, pan and styling.

That makes it the one worth taking on a schedule. An image shows what the map looked like on a Tuesday, while the JSON can be pulled into a spreadsheet or your own tooling.

All three files download as site-structure with the matching extension, so rename them as they land if you are keeping a series.

What The Sitemap Button Does

Sitemap downloads an XML file built from the pages already in your project. It is not fetched from your server, it is what the crawl found, filtered down to what belongs in a sitemap.

Three kinds of page are left out: planned pages that do not exist yet, pages that answered with a redirect or an error, and anything carrying noindex in its meta robots tag.

What survives is written shallowest page first, each with a last-modified date where the crawl recorded one. Relative URLs are made absolute against the project domain, and the file arrives as sitemap.xml.

When To Use Which

PNG for a slide or a printed document, JPG when the file has to be small enough to email, JSON when you want the data rather than a picture of it.

For anything a client will explore rather than glance at, a share link beats an export. They get the live map with the timeline, and you can revoke it when the engagement ends.

Exports earn their place when you are documenting change. Take one before the work and one after, pair them with the analysis tools, and the difference between the two images is the deliverable.