This package provides a simple API to retrieve a raster image (i.e. a matrix of RGB colours) from a map server.
rastermap is not currently available on CRAN, please install with:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("hadley/rastermap")
houston <- fetch_region(c(-95.80204, -94.92313), c(29.38048, 30.14344),
stamen("terrain"))
houston
plot(houston)
To avoid downloading the same maps again and again, rastermap locally caches the you've downloaded. By default, they will be stored in a session specific temporary directory which will be deleted each time you quit R. If you want them to persist across sessions, set the global option "rastermap.cache".