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QGIS is the mapping software you didn't know you needed

cozzyd 4y ago
QGIS is amazing. Though I say that as someone with no experience with other GIS packages so I'm blissfully ignorant of anything it might be missing.
- ungawatkt 4y ago
  I'm years out of date, but it competed well with ArcGIS until the expert level, to the point that I gave up my ArcGIS license where I was working and didn't miss much of anything day to day. QGIS also has server and headless options, plus lots of the QGIS core is importable into python scripts.
alanbernstein 4y ago
I was excited when I learned about a way to create custom georeferenced map PDFs (say, based on an official, but not georeferenced, national park map document). It used qgis, plus one or two other open source tools. It seemed straightforward, if a bit tedious. But I was never able to get the resulting files to work properly on my Android device. The instructions said to use an app called avenza maps, which would understand the georeference data, and show your maps, other maps, plus routes and tracks, all on one display. It just didn't work consistently for me, sadly. From what I understood, qgis was doing its job properly. It was a neat tool. I guess the whole stack for this use case was just too fragile.
lukeqsee 4y ago
QGIS is the swiss army knife of geospatial computing. I use it daily, and frequently, for all sorts of work building a location API SaaS company. It's a sterling success of open source, on par with as impactful as Linux, for the geospatial world (IMO).
- nerdponx 4y ago
  What are the good resources for learning QGIS? I tried to perform what I thought were basic tasks of drawing a few line segments and measuring geodesic distances between two points, but I needed a janky plugin for the former and never figured out how to do the latter. I really do want to learn it however, since it's a lot easier sometimes to work interactively than doing everything in Python code, and I know QGIS is supposed to be a very powerful tool in general.
  - jjwiseman 4y ago
    I found this online course to be pretty useful: https://www.udemy.com/course/mapacademy/ https://www.udemy.com/course/mapacademy/
  - trynewideas 4y ago
    I learned QGIS arguably the hard way (creating a new non-Earth global basemap from scratch, with no prior GIS experience) but: - The QGIS Training Manual is good. Not great; don't be afraid to go out of order after the first few modules to get to parts useful to you, because the module organization after "Creating Vector Data" stops being terribly linear. https://docs.qgis.org/3.22/en/docs/training_manual/index.html https://docs.qgis.org/3.22/en/docs/training_manual/index.htm... - https://www.qgistutorials.com/en/ https://www.qgistutorials.com/en/ is more project- and task-oriented, and where I learned georeferencing and digitizing (drawing over raster maps) - If you prefer video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHolzMgaqwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHolzMgaqwE is geared more toward using third-party data EDIT: There's also this UCDavis workshop for people with no mapping experience. Haven't used it but at a glance it looks pretty comprehensive. https://github.com/ucdavisdatalab/Intro-to-Desktop-GIS-with-QGIS https://github.com/ucdavisdatalab/Intro-to-Desktop-GIS-with-..., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAcZUPSmqDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAcZUPSmqDE
  - otter-in-a-suit 4y ago
    You can measure distances natively in QGIS, the symbol looks like a ruler. Adding permanent points requires adding a layer, e.g. a shapefile of points. That being said, as I've outlined in the article, I certainly haven't properly learned it... But having dabbled in Python/Folium and the like (most recently did geo vis with Superset for another article), some of the datasets and functionalities were familiar (I also had to do point-in-polygon problems in Python, way back when, so maybe that mental scar helped :) ). I found random blog articles and stackexchange posts for specific questions I got stuck on the most helpful. For instance, I have this link saved: https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/421467/not-geotagged-photos-in-qgis https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/421467/not-geotagged... , which got me down the rabbit hole of "Oh, you can make a style a function of other things? You can read EXIF? How neat!" (where I then found some other posts). What I will say, almost everything online is out of date - the GUI changed frequently, plugins are now native functionalities etc. The HTML tooltip thing I did is also a modification of an older blog article (which I'm afraid I didn't save), whereas the contour line styling I took verbatim from the article I linked in that paragraph.
Waterluvian 4y ago
The moment I graduated and lost access to ArcGIS I got out QGIS and become ridiculously empowered. Yea Arc has Python APIs for some things but QGIS, while rough in the UI department, gives you powerful access to everything. And it plays so well with other things: check out my presentation on using QGIS in robotics (pdf) https://roscon.ros.org/2018/presentations/ROSCon2018_UnleashingGISToolbox.pdf https://roscon.ros.org/2018/presentations/ROSCon2018_Unleash...
- jjwiseman 4y ago
  That's a very cool example of somewhat unconventional QGIS use.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  QGIS has python bindings that are thin wrappers over the C++ bindings. It works well enough that a complete noob like me was able to use it.
- danuker 4y ago
  You could say... you've SLAMmed QGIS onto your robots ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_mapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_...
- mr337 4y ago
  I was just thinking the other day of writing a QGIS plugin for handle GNSS data from ROS. Like rviz but more aligned for out application. Very cool!
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    PRs and maintainers welcome! Regrettably I haven’t worked on it in years. It hasn’t been too important for the direction my job went in. :)
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  Cool presentation, thanks for sharing it.
n8cpdx 4y ago
Disclosure: I work for Esri, creator of ArcGIS, so obviously I'm extremely biased. But I'm not in sales, just a lowly dev fwiw. QGIS is great software, and I respect what they're doing. ArcGIS Online is a pretty great option and the Living Atlas [1] makes it really easy to consume a lot of data (a bunch of NASA datasets were recently added) and make cool maps. ArcGIS Online ends up being almost like Dropbox for geographic data, but instead of just files you can get full services, and a suite of apps for taking advantage of the services. That includes taking maps offline, making field edits, and syncing them (although that starts to cost money). You can try the map tool without signing in, and that gives you a good idea of what you can do in the browser (custom popups, charts, tables, filtering, symbology, clustering, cartographic blending, etc). https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?layers=dece90af1a0242dcbf0ca36d30276aa3 https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?layers=dece... The personal use subscription is $100/year and includes the full desktop software and cloud storage. [2] [1] https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/en/browse/#d=2 https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/en/browse/#d=2 [2] https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/products/arcgis-for-personal-use/buy https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/products/arcgis-for-person... edit: forgot to mention there is a great developer story: https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/latest/sample-code/ https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/latest/sample-code/
- clumsysmurf 4y ago
  I was about to buy the personal use subscription until I learned ArcGIS doesn't run on macOS (unless you use parallels or bootcamp). Are there any plans for a native macOS version? For someone that wants to learn more about GIS in general, does the web version have what is needed?
  - n8cpdx 4y ago
    I think you can get very far with ArcGIS Online. There are things you can only do in ArcGIS Pro, but basically everything shown in the article (and a lot more) can be done in the browser. And you get a great set of apps (including Field Maps and QuickCapture) for field editing/data capture. In my personal experience with using ArcGIS, I have only needed Pro in two situations. The first is when I'm trying to georeference a raster (I just bought one from SkyFi). The second is when I've bought a tutorial book that is based around ArcGIS Pro (e.g. Modern Policing Using ArcGIS Pro). If you want to learn ArcGIS and not rely on Pro, you can visit the learn site and filter to just ArcGIS Online: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/gallery/#?p=agol https://learn.arcgis.com/en/gallery/#?p=agol I won't say more, but I have personally been impressed by the rate of improvement in feature capability in ArcGIS Online. I am not aware of any plans to move Pro to macOS, I feel your pain there.
nobleach 4y ago
QGIS and PostGIS were my jam when I worked in that space. We were an ESRI shop so Oracle/SQL Server with SDE (topped with ArcGIS) were the official tools. Some of us were always looking for ways to subvert the culture by building tools based on open source stacks. One of my favorite experiences from that era: We were meeting with a few ESRI reps for some integration stuff. The lead hot-shot was on his phone playing around during the meeting. He was basically on autopilot. The other two folks were working with GeoJSON response convertors. I said, "I built one of those with TopoJSON". One guy said, "I've never heard of it". I showed them how it was much more efficient and used splines instead of points. The lead dropped his phone and said, "I need you to tell me MORE about that". I showed them the service. They invited me to lunch, I politely declined and said, "today's my last day so I have a ton of things to wrap up". I do miss that realm sometimes.
- tomrod 4y ago
  I love QGIS. It's like a super useful Excel of mapping, and so much more. I've had difficulty making it work for production services (especially extensions). Ultimately moved more towards the Python/OSM stack. Such a fun space.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    What made it problematic to run in prod for you?
- whoopdeepoo 4y ago
  ESRI is a scourge on the GIS industry. One of the creators of postgis can say it much better than I can. https://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2018/11/esri-dominates.html https://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2018/11/esri-dominates.html
  - RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
    The educational world needs to stop supporting them.
jug 4y ago
Meanwhile, some of us are sad sods stuck on having chosen to integrate with MapInfo once upon a time...
gkamradt 4y ago
I’ve used QGIS for a few years to build www.TerraMano.co We make 3D Maps of American Landscapes in bronze. We take Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data, do light transformations in QGIS and convert it to an .STL file before additional 3D modeling. Our latest project was a hairy one doing Oahu (https://terramano.co/blogs/product/oahu-bronze-3d-map https://terramano.co/blogs/product/oahu-bronze-3d-map)
- n1b0m 4y ago
  That’s beautiful
  - gkamradt 4y ago
    Thank you
- otter-in-a-suit 4y ago
  Those look phenomenal!
  - gkamradt 4y ago
    Thank you!
- jtr1 4y ago
  Wow, these are gorgeous! Can I ask where you get your DEM data and at what resolution? I’ve been wanting to play around with some relief maps of various bioregions (eg the Great Lakes watershed, Cascadia, etc), but I’ve had trouble figuring out where to find data at the right resolution
  - defrost 4y ago
    USGS provides all their data for free https://www.usgs.gov/the-national-map-data-delivery/gis-data-download https://www.usgs.gov/the-national-map-data-delivery/gis-data... They have full US coverage and many infill sets at higher resolutions. They have 1 metre DEMs ( ~ one elevation per three foot x three foot square ) https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/items?q=&filter=tags=Digital%20Elevation%20Model%20(DEM)%201%20meter https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/items?q=&filter=tags=Dig... and more if you get to know their community and products (they are a firehose of likely more data than many can afford to reliably store).
jFriedensreich 4y ago
This piece of software brings back fond memories. It was just amazing to discover this after struggling for days with commercial ill fit tools and suddenly feeling i could do anything imaginable. We used this to model and visualize malaria cases and population distribution and plan health care monitoring in liberia. I think the only thing comparable to this feeling is discovering VLC to play video files as a teenager.
- harabat 4y ago
  I'm trying to find a good project to work on to start learning QGIS, and what you described sounds interesting. Would you happen to have a write-up of this?
  - jFriedensreich 4y ago
    sorry not really, but i recommend something where you have an interesting question and at least one dataset you need. A nice starting point is always to get some of your private data exported google and others have about your location history and come up with nice questions. another approach is to browse the plenty of public datasets and use gapminder for inspiration about topics or questions you want to answer.
twelvechairs 4y ago
QGIS is absolutely one of the biggest open source success stories. Its interesting to see the funding and delivery of new features is largely done in Europe where in the US it is extrmely hard to not use ESRI products. A couple of packages used by qgis worth calling out - postgis which really grew up with qgis, and pdal which is a relatively new but incredible package for working with point cloud data.
- Helmut10001 4y ago
  Yes, Europe is going the OSS path. I work at University and almost everyone I know in GIS fields switched to QGIS in the past 5 years. Most government departments are also (trying) to switch, some succeeded already (others are waiting for important people to enter pension, so their replacements are more OSS minded).
  - culi 4y ago
    It'd be funny to see English's status as the modern lingua franca get overthrown simply due to our government's refusal to embrace FLOSS
015UUZn8aEvW 4y ago
QGIS is very powerful, but it's not exactly user friendly. The UI is hard to learn, and important functionality is buried several layers deep in non-intuitive drop-down menus and buttons. I think a simplified GIS program with stripped-down functionality and an intuitive UI could be a big hit. Think of SketchUp versus SolidWorks or ProE.
- hummus_bae 4y ago
  No argument there. I've worked with ArcGIS, Autocad, Sketchup, Civil3D, and QGIS. Though clumsy, QGIS is the most powerful by far of these applications.
- bostonvaulter2 4y ago
  In many ways that is what we're building at Felt (where I work). We don't offer much in the way of analysis, but we make it very easy (IMO of course) to share your maps. Here's a couple maps that I have made about the Honoulu marathon that I wouldn't have made in a more complex/time-intensive piece/powerful piece of software: - https://felt.com/map/UNOFFICIAL-Honolulu-Marathon-2022-TCg9CKrVlRDiZqwY8UArBtC https://felt.com/map/UNOFFICIAL-Honolulu-Marathon-2022-TCg9C... - https://felt.com/map/UNOFFICIAL-Honolulu-Marathon-2022-Road-Closures-Cb0NhIc3TPafRBLBqUwYJD https://felt.com/map/UNOFFICIAL-Honolulu-Marathon-2022-Road-...
  - kilolima 4y ago
    Nice maps but why do you have to share with the world a map of North Shore surf spots?
- trynewideas 4y ago
  I think part of the question (and problem) is, which part of QGIS do you focus on? The digitizing and geometry parts? The map-rendering part? Georeferencing? Vector and raster analysis? Or to put it another way, what's the workflow that a simpler, more opinionated interface would solve, and what features could or would you sacrifice for it?
  - 4y ago
jtmiclat 4y ago
Just FYI for all QGIS fans, QGIS had a recent call for funding. https://blog.qgis.org/2023/01/16/crowd-funding-call-2023/ https://blog.qgis.org/2023/01/16/crowd-funding-call-2023/
- CSSer 4y ago
  This took me way too long to find: https://donate.qgis.org/ https://donate.qgis.org/
  - luketaylor 4y ago
    Looks like they have Github sponsors set up too: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS https://github.com/qgis/QGIS
ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
I used to program python plugins for QGIS, I really miss it. It made me feel really useful, I'd write visualization algorithms one day and the next it was deployed to the whole company and people would email me telling me how much easier it made their job. I don't think I've ever felt this valued since, every other job I had was a small part of a big whole. I'd kill to find a full remote job doing that.
- lukeqsee 4y ago
  Can you email me luke <at> stadiamaps.com? I would love to chat about QGIS plugins, and we may be able to sponsor you to build one.
- vsharma-next 4y ago
  Hello, would love to chat with you about QGIS plugins. Email me at devjobs@anor.io if you would be interested in making a QGIS plugin for the solar PV industry :)
hawski 4y ago
I would like QGIS to have a REPL with autocompletion. Where do people with QGIS knowledge hang out (especially devs)?
- glonq 4y ago
  What coordinate system would you like the answer in? ;)
  - defrost 4y ago
    Ideally a conformal mapping projection with minimum scale error. I'm saddened that complex-number polynomial expansion fell out of vogue and fear that was the last wall that kept the muggles out of hard core map projections.
- trynewideas 4y ago
  https://thespatialcommunity.org/ https://thespatialcommunity.org/ and https://discord.com/invite/nkmGYttFhH https://discord.com/invite/nkmGYttFhH to start.
noja 4y ago
https://anna.ps/blog/how-to-use-land-registry-data-to-explore-land-ownership-near-you https://anna.ps/blog/how-to-use-land-registry-data-to-explor...
joxel 4y ago
Getting paid to do GIS made me realize I needed to learn to code because it sucked
- shoo 4y ago
  Do you still do GIS through code or have you escaped entirely?
idleprocess 4y ago
I love exploring open GIS datasets with QGIS. It's incredible what this tool can do and I keep discovering new features or plugins all the time, which keeps it interesting. The amount of publicly available GIS data combined with tools like QGIS and PostGIS can be a big time saver. I don't work in the space, but occasionally run into problems requiring some form of support for geospatial data. Need a list of US cities and postal codes along with their respective coordinates? Easy. Find the dataset, import into QGIS, export to PostGIS. Done.
crtified 4y ago
I spent a decade in the GIS space, ending back around the final days of ArcGIS 9.x, or very early days of 10.x. I also remember various alternative and early open source efforts of the time. Then, about a year ago, after several years away from the scene, I got some mojo back and started investigating modern QGIS. I was very pleasantly surprised, it immediately felt like an upgrade from what I used to use. And also felt like coming home, in that it was obvious and intuitive how to accomplish the standard functions. If someone had put me in (that famous thing) a blindfolded time machine for a zero-year trip, popped me out, put me in front of QGIS and said "Welcome! This is ArcGIS 9.6!", it wouldn't have been at all unbelievable. If you know what I mean. No it's not perfect. Casually and hastily wing your way around a project, copypasting here and there, setting up all kinds of parameters and advanced display bits&bobs, and - like most complex geospatial software - you'll, once in awhile, find yourself unceremoniously dumped out onto the desktop with a software error. So a highly robust and restore-able workflow is still essential. But regardless it's up there with the very best packages I've ever used.
- Bedon292 4y ago
  Interesting, I have had the opposite experience to that. I spend a lot of time in ArcGIS late 9.x. and early 10.x and QGIS is not even remotely intuitive to me. You can drop me in ArcGIS Desktop or Pro years later and I can still intuit how to do everything, but I have to Google how to do anything in QGIS.
- anakaine 4y ago
  If you can, get yourself in front of an up to date version of ArcGIS Pro for a little while. The user interface will feel entirely different, and some people don't like it because it's different, but the entire package feels significantly better. Importantly, a good deal, though not all, of the infuriatingly frustrating "random esri error for who knows what reason" issues have been resolved, and continue to improve.
amluto 4y ago
I’m slowly making a map of my back yard in QGIS. One annoyance: I live in a place where tectonic movement over my expected lifespan is significant on the scale of my map. And so are the supposed inaccuracies in various coordinate systems. (I want to record where things are so I can find them again without digging big holes!) As far as I can tell, QGIS has no particular understanding of either a coordinate relative to the (moving!) crust or of a coordinate in space-time that can be projected to space at future or past times. Surely this should be a thing! I found HTDP, a web tool that can shift coordinates forward and back in time: https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/TOOLS/Htdp/Htdp.shtml https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/TOOLS/Htdp/Htdp.shtml And I found this discussion: https://www.gpsworld.com/the-effects-of-tectonic-plate-movement-on-the-modernized-2022-nsrs/ https://www.gpsworld.com/the-effects-of-tectonic-plate-movem... But I haven’t found anything easy to use. (I have an RTK-capable GPS and NTRIP data via UNAVCO from a nearby CORS station. I was hoping that storing position relative to such-and-such CORS station as it was on such—and-such date would be straightforwardly doable in QGIS.)
- LeonB 4y ago
  Wow that’s a pretty interesting (and scary) challenge. I know that the coordinate systems get revised every few years. In Australia we used to use AGD83 then it was revised to GDA94 and more recently to GDA2020 — and this was to account for tectonic shifts. And there’s calculations for transforming from one to the other. That’s the only clues I have on that side of things and I’ve forgotten most of what I’ve known.
  - LeonB 4y ago
    Also there’s a concept called “rubber sheeting” for transforming points where you know the amount of error at a bunch of points and you want to transform all the other points by interpolating how much error there would be at those points. The might be useful too, if you’re implementing a solution yourself.
    - trynewideas 4y ago
      Specifically https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/VectorBender/ https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/VectorBender/
chaps 4y ago
Oh very, very much yes. I've been using QGIS for about five years now as the first step in doing any sort of visualization work around GIS data. Better to trust a GIS application than my own bad d3 code :). It's also been absolutely fantastic for changing projections, changing resolutions, merging GIS files, things like that. My only complaint about it is that it can be a little bit slow sometimes. It has to redraw everything if you zoom in. That's especially annoying if you're working with data that has millions of multilines or points. But, as a prototyping engine, that's kind of expected and still better than paying for ArcGIS.
glonq 4y ago
Our project is not big enough to justify tools like ArcGIS. Previously I'd used Global Mapper, which is also commercial but is somewhat more reasonably priced. But I recently gave QGIS a shot and am very happy with what it can do. And the price is right!
patwolf 4y ago
I used QGIS to help me import some terrain into Minecraft. I found a lidar elevation map, used QGIS to visualize it in 3d and tweak some things, and then I was able to use another tool to do the conversion into Minecraft. Definitely an impressive tool.
LeonB 4y ago
Every field has its own “occupational hazards” - I found that with maps and mapping the maps themselves were so fascinating, you could get drawn in and lose a lot of time just… exploring I guess. QGis is great, lots of tools are nice. Generally ESRI sucks up all the oxygen and leaves not enough for innovation and implementations from anyone else. There are a lot of features and capabilities needed in the Geospatial world that do not have reliable, rock-solid open source implementations. (I could’ve provided examples a few years ago but now I’ve forgotten the important details and only have opinions left)
- heliodor 4y ago
  > There are a lot of features and capabilities needed in the Geospatial world that do not have reliable, rock-solid open source implementations Can you list a few please?
mastax 4y ago
I've been using QGIS a bit for simple things. Viewing OSM road data in a PostGIS database. Viewing geojson files. Everything has been more difficult than I expected, but I think that might just come with the territory. I'm working through PostGIS in Action to try to get the requisite background knowledge. One thing that's frustrated me, and I want to make sure it isn't a misconfiguration on my end, is that QGIS feels really slow. For example, I have a 150MB geojson file which has 300,000 points with associated metadata. Even when I'm zoomed in such that I can only see a few thousand points at a time, if I pan the map over by 50% it takes at least 10 seconds before it loads in the new points. Many long operations seem to take place synchronously on the UI thread, so the whole app is unresponsive while they take place. Clicking the drop down arrow on a PostGIS Schema to view the tables spins for several minutes. No other Postgres tool I have takes that long, so it's not the database. The PostGIS import/export tools were also extremely slow and didn't have progress bars. I'm using 3.24 currently. I don't want to rag on it too hard, but it's really hampered my enthusiasm for working with maps and GIS.
- geenew 4y ago
  You'd probably be well-served by exporting to some format with a spatial index. GeoJson is just a textfile, not much better than reading in a CSV. The current recommended format is Geopackage (gpkg), which is based on SQLite. Edit: agreed on the slowness of DB connections, I've found that too, including for relatively small locally-hosted DBs.
  - mastax 4y ago
    Yeah, converting it to gpkg sped it up a lot, thanks! I assumed that since geojson is completely unsuitable for querying directly, it would load the whole thing into a native in-memory format, but perhaps not.
- blacha 4y ago
  I don't think geojson is a great format for anything with more than a few MB of data. I wanted to see exactly how bad it is with a largeish datasets, so I exported the New Zealand address dataset[1] with ~2.5M points as a geopackage (750MB) QGIS loads this fine its a little slow when viewing the entire country but when zoomed into city level it is almost instant to pan around. Using ogr2ogr I converted it to ndgeojson (2.5GB), It crashed my QGIS while trying to load it. Using shuf I created a random 100,000 points geojson (~110MB) it was unbearably slow in QGIS while panning around 5+ seconds. I currently use and recommend flatgeobuf[2] for most of my working datasets as it is super quick and doesn't need sqlite to read (eg in a browser). It is also super easy to convert to/from with ogr2ogr ogr2ogr -f flatgeobuf output.fgb input.geojson [1] https://data.linz.govt.nz/layer/105689-nz-addresses/data/ https://data.linz.govt.nz/layer/105689-nz-addresses/data/ [2] https://github.com/flatgeobuf/flatgeobuf https://github.com/flatgeobuf/flatgeobuf
hfbff 4y ago
>A note for my European friends - some of these links might not work from outside the US, as some .gov links tend not to. Is the author assuming you're either from the US or European if you're reading the blog?
- otter-in-a-suit 4y ago
  I usually post these on LinkedIn and send them to friends - didn’t expect this to gain traction on HN! I’m originally from Germany, hence the bias towards readers from Europe. :)
tonyarkles 4y ago
A couple of years ago I started working with drones and writing a bunch of custom software. One of my pet peeves in the drone industry is that a ton of stuff uses “reinvented wheels” that are drone-specific or product-specific instead of just riffing on open standards. Given that, I decided to spend a day or two and do a bit of a survey of the different open standards that are available around kind of the GIS/mapping world, the aviation world, etc. At this point I didn’t even know about QGIS, but I was happy that instead of reinventing the wheel I already had well-defined file formats etc. to work with. QGIS came a little bit later when I had a bunch of data to analyze. My image metadata wasn’t exactly right for QGIS (and couldn’t have been done that way in real-time anyway), but a 3-line shell script using GDAL converted all of my images into something QGIS could load and draw directly overlaid on top of Google Maps. My flight plans were all done in annotated GeoJSON, which QGIS happily loaded as-is and helpfully split it into the layers I had used under the hood as my data encoding. There were a couple of files that were just plain-old CSV, and QGIS happily ingested those and drew them as points and lines and line segments as appropriate. It’s phenomenally good. Some other people in this discussion have mentioned that the UI is a bit rough and I can’t disagree with that, although I feel the same way about the commercial tools too. It’s a power tool for sure, but it doesn’t take too long to figure out the quirks and build yourself a workflow.
geenew 4y ago
Don't forget, QGIS is one of several projects of OSGeo. A significant part of the fundamentals come from GDAL, another OSGeo project, which is very excellent if you ever need to do some command-line processing of or need a library for raster or vector GIS data. Their licensing isn't perfect - the QGIS installer, for example, more-or-less requires acceptance of a few free-as-in-beer but still proprietary licenses, which are used for some specific raster formats. Still, it's one of the great free software success stories, I think. It definitely feels like they will eventually displace ESRI. Most shops will probably keep ESRI around for some format conversions or niche tasks. However, the day-to-day desktop GIS is almost exclusively QGIS in the places I've worked, if only because you can throw it on any machine you want to without worrying about licensing.
- otter-in-a-suit 4y ago
  I did call out GDAL, but missed the whole OSGeo ecosystem, I’m afraid. Very cool to hear that QGIS is such a prominent piece of software in professional settings! I’m just a software/data engineer who dabbles in this stuff for fun, so I had no idea. Lots of comments here asserting the same thing. It would be amazing to see OSS (even though not truly FOSS) replace industry giants. I see this happening a lot in my space, where a lot of OSS (mostly Apache, some MIT and consorts) overtakes commercial offerings.
  - geenew 4y ago
    > I did call out GDAL I see that now, sorry! Excellent article, by the way, it's very useful to have this kind of writeup. I suspect it's something to do with the distributed installation, and the amount of the required behaviour that is sitting behind completed specifications. Eventually, it will be cheaper for a user to just pay for development of any remaining features they need than pay for licensing. And, the functionality addition is cumulative - pay once, keep forever.
- dinkumthinkum 4y ago
  I mean I don’t want yo dis ping your experience but no shot. I’m not sure where you worked but esri just is a massively dominant player still. I’m government and infrastructure, which is esri’s primary market, QGIS is nowhere near replacing it on the desktop. Now, QGIS is a great project but we can’t be naive about the situation.
sideband 4y ago
QGIS is fantastic and that team deserves a lot of praise for their work over the years. However, the article calls out using KML as a data source and unfortunately QGIS does not have the best support for KML. One of the reasons KML is still around despite it's faults is because a KML author can easily design a UI for their data in Google Earth, organizing data by folders with descriptions, including pre-defined views and image overlays among other things (a basic example here: https://kmzview.com/5qBGblENff4w0RkQf89J https://kmzview.com/5qBGblENff4w0RkQf89J). Then, anybody who opens that KML in Google Earth gets that same UI. There are a lot of casual consumers of this type of data and this experience is powerful for them. I think QGIS could really broaden their appeal to this casual user base by supporting these well-loved KML features.
- otter-in-a-suit 4y ago
  TIL. I used what I got from my rural county’s website / GIS (hence kml) - I wonder if I could get proper shape files by calling their GIS department.
  - dvdkon 4y ago
    Shapefiles are no more proper than KML, I'd even say KML is a better format, since it's a single file and doesn't have the archaic name limitations of SHP.
    - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
      Shapefiles are faster to read.
    - anakaine 4y ago
      KMLs do not have a spatial index. Reading a properly constructed shapefile with 2m points is fine, and running a SQL query on it is also fine. Trying to do that with an xml based file is not fine. Each of the major GIS packages spends quite a bit of effort to convert kml to an in memory spatially indexed dataset on ingestion. Shapefile conversely does not have to sit entirely in memory to still be reasonably quick. Shapefiles do have the anyone field name length limit, among a few other things, but alternate formats that recognise that issue have existed and been popular for well over 20 years. In other news, geopackage is based upon sqllite, supports long field names, a good assortment of data types, and is finding good adoption among many facets of spatial products from desktop to scripting, etc.
grahar64 4y ago
QGIS is great, used it to cut out laser cut maps as presents for my neighbors. Has a steep learning curve but ton of online help.
Phithagoras 4y ago
QGIS is great, I use it daily and I hugely prefer it (and it's mobile equivalent Qfield) to ArcGIS and FieldMaps. The educational world is pretty split between ArcGIS and QGIS. Students don't want to pay over $100 for a yearly ArGIS student license, but more advanced geostatistical analysis isn't supported yet on QGIS. Progress is slower in industry, especially in larger companies. Other critical software like Autodesk, Vulcan, DESWICK, MODFLOW, and Leapfrog already work (somewhat) smoothly with ArcGIS. QGIS is just another thing to go wrong in managers minds, and there is zero opensource progress in developing applications as powerful as QGIS in geomatics adjacent fields.
- heliodor 4y ago
  Can you provide a few examples please for your statement: "but more advanced geostatistical analysis isn't supported yet on QGIS"? I'd like to hear more about this.
jokoon 4y ago
I remember trying it once, it's quite bloated. I'd rather use simplified command line things instead. For example I don't even remember how to generate raster tiles if I want to host my own maps, I don't think openstreetmap distribute the software they use to make their tiles, out they don't really document how to do it. So like most open source initiatives, it's not all good.
- urschrei 4y ago
  QGIS isn’t bloated, it’s a big tool for a big problem space. You can’t use “simplified command line things” for a vast majority of GIS tasks, if only because they require visual interactivity. That having been said, why on earth would you want to use a GUI application to generate raster tiles? The only input required is an extent and a zoom level. Use GDAL or any of ten other free and open-source command-line tools readily available. It sounds like you’re leaving a dismissive drive-by comment rooted largely in your misunderstanding of a large and complex field with use cases which are largely disjoint. Analysts need GUIs and a lot of different analytics tools. People making web maps don’t.
zzleeper 4y ago
I'm quite late to the thread, but has anyone found out a way to use QGIS programmatically? For research you often want to write routines that you can re-run in the future (replicability, reproductibility, etc.) and it's very easy to do so with statistical software (Stata, R, even Py) but with QGIS I just have a README saying "click here, click there, etc.". Tried to wrap everything in a QGIS Python script once, but it was impossible as there was not a one-to-one translation between clicks and code.
- ungawatkt 4y ago
  It wasn't 1-1 with clicks, and it took a ton of trial and error, but I managed to get there eventually with a project. Here's the passable write up I made for it, theres a link to the final script towards the end, hopefully theres enough to be helpful. https://www.odinseye.cloud/musings/qgis_scripting/ https://www.odinseye.cloud/musings/qgis_scripting/
a1371 4y ago
A couple of weeks ago I got a point cloud file with no clue about how to open it. Sure enough QGIS came to rescue and I learned it has a 3D view as well. I'm grateful for it :)

QGIS is amazing. Though I say that as someone with no experience with other GIS packages so I'm blissfully ignorant of anything it might be missing.

ungawatkt 4y ago
I'm years out of date, but it competed well with ArcGIS until the expert level, to the point that I gave up my ArcGIS license where I was working and didn't miss much of anything day to day. QGIS also has server and headless options, plus lots of the QGIS core is importable into python scripts.

alanbernstein 4y ago

I was excited when I learned about a way to create custom georeferenced map PDFs (say, based on an official, but not georeferenced, national park map document). It used qgis, plus one or two other open source tools. It seemed straightforward, if a bit tedious. But I was never able to get the resulting files to work properly on my Android device. The instructions said to use an app called avenza maps, which would understand the georeference data, and show your maps, other maps, plus routes and tracks, all on one display. It just didn't work consistently for me, sadly. From what I understood, qgis was doing its job properly. It was a neat tool. I guess the whole stack for this use case was just too fragile.

lukeqsee 4y ago

QGIS is the swiss army knife of geospatial computing. I use it daily, and frequently, for all sorts of work building a location API SaaS company. It's a sterling success of open source, on par with as impactful as Linux, for the geospatial world (IMO).

nerdponx 4y ago
What are the good resources for learning QGIS? I tried to perform what I thought were basic tasks of drawing a few line segments and measuring geodesic distances between two points, but I needed a janky plugin for the former and never figured out how to do the latter. I really do want to learn it however, since it's a lot easier sometimes to work interactively than doing everything in Python code, and I know QGIS is supposed to be a very powerful tool in general.
- jjwiseman 4y ago
  I found this online course to be pretty useful: https://www.udemy.com/course/mapacademy/ https://www.udemy.com/course/mapacademy/
- trynewideas 4y ago
  I learned QGIS arguably the hard way (creating a new non-Earth global basemap from scratch, with no prior GIS experience) but: - The QGIS Training Manual is good. Not great; don't be afraid to go out of order after the first few modules to get to parts useful to you, because the module organization after "Creating Vector Data" stops being terribly linear. https://docs.qgis.org/3.22/en/docs/training_manual/index.html https://docs.qgis.org/3.22/en/docs/training_manual/index.htm... - https://www.qgistutorials.com/en/ https://www.qgistutorials.com/en/ is more project- and task-oriented, and where I learned georeferencing and digitizing (drawing over raster maps) - If you prefer video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHolzMgaqwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHolzMgaqwE is geared more toward using third-party data EDIT: There's also this UCDavis workshop for people with no mapping experience. Haven't used it but at a glance it looks pretty comprehensive. https://github.com/ucdavisdatalab/Intro-to-Desktop-GIS-with-QGIS https://github.com/ucdavisdatalab/Intro-to-Desktop-GIS-with-..., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAcZUPSmqDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAcZUPSmqDE
- otter-in-a-suit 4y ago
  You can measure distances natively in QGIS, the symbol looks like a ruler. Adding permanent points requires adding a layer, e.g. a shapefile of points. That being said, as I've outlined in the article, I certainly haven't properly learned it... But having dabbled in Python/Folium and the like (most recently did geo vis with Superset for another article), some of the datasets and functionalities were familiar (I also had to do point-in-polygon problems in Python, way back when, so maybe that mental scar helped :) ). I found random blog articles and stackexchange posts for specific questions I got stuck on the most helpful. For instance, I have this link saved: https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/421467/not-geotagged-photos-in-qgis https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/421467/not-geotagged... , which got me down the rabbit hole of "Oh, you can make a style a function of other things? You can read EXIF? How neat!" (where I then found some other posts). What I will say, almost everything online is out of date - the GUI changed frequently, plugins are now native functionalities etc. The HTML tooltip thing I did is also a modification of an older blog article (which I'm afraid I didn't save), whereas the contour line styling I took verbatim from the article I linked in that paragraph.

Waterluvian 4y ago

The moment I graduated and lost access to ArcGIS I got out QGIS and become ridiculously empowered. Yea Arc has Python APIs for some things but QGIS, while rough in the UI department, gives you powerful access to everything. And it plays so well with other things: check out my presentation on using QGIS in robotics (pdf) https://roscon.ros.org/2018/presentations/ROSCon2018_UnleashingGISToolbox.pdf https://roscon.ros.org/2018/presentations/ROSCon2018_Unleash...

jjwiseman 4y ago
That's a very cool example of somewhat unconventional QGIS use.
mrguyorama 4y ago
QGIS has python bindings that are thin wrappers over the C++ bindings. It works well enough that a complete noob like me was able to use it.
danuker 4y ago
You could say... you've SLAMmed QGIS onto your robots ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_mapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_...
mr337 4y ago
I was just thinking the other day of writing a QGIS plugin for handle GNSS data from ROS. Like rviz but more aligned for out application. Very cool!
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  PRs and maintainers welcome! Regrettably I haven’t worked on it in years. It hasn’t been too important for the direction my job went in. :)
heavyset_go 4y ago
Cool presentation, thanks for sharing it.

n8cpdx 4y ago

Disclosure: I work for Esri, creator of ArcGIS, so obviously I'm extremely biased. But I'm not in sales, just a lowly dev fwiw. QGIS is great software, and I respect what they're doing. ArcGIS Online is a pretty great option and the Living Atlas [1] makes it really easy to consume a lot of data (a bunch of NASA datasets were recently added) and make cool maps. ArcGIS Online ends up being almost like Dropbox for geographic data, but instead of just files you can get full services, and a suite of apps for taking advantage of the services. That includes taking maps offline, making field edits, and syncing them (although that starts to cost money). You can try the map tool without signing in, and that gives you a good idea of what you can do in the browser (custom popups, charts, tables, filtering, symbology, clustering, cartographic blending, etc). https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?layers=dece90af1a0242dcbf0ca36d30276aa3 https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?layers=dece... The personal use subscription is $100/year and includes the full desktop software and cloud storage. [2] [1] https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/en/browse/#d=2 https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/en/browse/#d=2 [2] https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/products/arcgis-for-personal-use/buy https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/products/arcgis-for-person... edit: forgot to mention there is a great developer story: https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/latest/sample-code/ https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/latest/sample-code/

clumsysmurf 4y ago
I was about to buy the personal use subscription until I learned ArcGIS doesn't run on macOS (unless you use parallels or bootcamp). Are there any plans for a native macOS version? For someone that wants to learn more about GIS in general, does the web version have what is needed?
- n8cpdx 4y ago
  I think you can get very far with ArcGIS Online. There are things you can only do in ArcGIS Pro, but basically everything shown in the article (and a lot more) can be done in the browser. And you get a great set of apps (including Field Maps and QuickCapture) for field editing/data capture. In my personal experience with using ArcGIS, I have only needed Pro in two situations. The first is when I'm trying to georeference a raster (I just bought one from SkyFi). The second is when I've bought a tutorial book that is based around ArcGIS Pro (e.g. Modern Policing Using ArcGIS Pro). If you want to learn ArcGIS and not rely on Pro, you can visit the learn site and filter to just ArcGIS Online: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/gallery/#?p=agol https://learn.arcgis.com/en/gallery/#?p=agol I won't say more, but I have personally been impressed by the rate of improvement in feature capability in ArcGIS Online. I am not aware of any plans to move Pro to macOS, I feel your pain there.

nobleach 4y ago

QGIS and PostGIS were my jam when I worked in that space. We were an ESRI shop so Oracle/SQL Server with SDE (topped with ArcGIS) were the official tools. Some of us were always looking for ways to subvert the culture by building tools based on open source stacks. One of my favorite experiences from that era: We were meeting with a few ESRI reps for some integration stuff. The lead hot-shot was on his phone playing around during the meeting. He was basically on autopilot. The other two folks were working with GeoJSON response convertors. I said, "I built one of those with TopoJSON". One guy said, "I've never heard of it". I showed them how it was much more efficient and used splines instead of points. The lead dropped his phone and said, "I need you to tell me MORE about that". I showed them the service. They invited me to lunch, I politely declined and said, "today's my last day so I have a ton of things to wrap up". I do miss that realm sometimes.

tomrod 4y ago
I love QGIS. It's like a super useful Excel of mapping, and so much more. I've had difficulty making it work for production services (especially extensions). Ultimately moved more towards the Python/OSM stack. Such a fun space.
- nine_k 4y ago
  What made it problematic to run in prod for you?
whoopdeepoo 4y ago
ESRI is a scourge on the GIS industry. One of the creators of postgis can say it much better than I can. https://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2018/11/esri-dominates.html https://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2018/11/esri-dominates.html
- RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
  The educational world needs to stop supporting them.

jug 4y ago

Meanwhile, some of us are sad sods stuck on having chosen to integrate with MapInfo once upon a time...

gkamradt 4y ago

I’ve used QGIS for a few years to build www.TerraMano.co We make 3D Maps of American Landscapes in bronze. We take Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data, do light transformations in QGIS and convert it to an .STL file before additional 3D modeling. Our latest project was a hairy one doing Oahu (https://terramano.co/blogs/product/oahu-bronze-3d-map https://terramano.co/blogs/product/oahu-bronze-3d-map)

n1b0m 4y ago
That’s beautiful
- gkamradt 4y ago
  Thank you
otter-in-a-suit 4y ago
Those look phenomenal!
- gkamradt 4y ago
  Thank you!
jtr1 4y ago
Wow, these are gorgeous! Can I ask where you get your DEM data and at what resolution? I’ve been wanting to play around with some relief maps of various bioregions (eg the Great Lakes watershed, Cascadia, etc), but I’ve had trouble figuring out where to find data at the right resolution
- defrost 4y ago
  USGS provides all their data for free https://www.usgs.gov/the-national-map-data-delivery/gis-data-download https://www.usgs.gov/the-national-map-data-delivery/gis-data... They have full US coverage and many infill sets at higher resolutions. They have 1 metre DEMs ( ~ one elevation per three foot x three foot square ) https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/items?q=&filter=tags=Digital%20Elevation%20Model%20(DEM)%201%20meter https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/items?q=&filter=tags=Dig... and more if you get to know their community and products (they are a firehose of likely more data than many can afford to reliably store).

jFriedensreich 4y ago

This piece of software brings back fond memories. It was just amazing to discover this after struggling for days with commercial ill fit tools and suddenly feeling i could do anything imaginable. We used this to model and visualize malaria cases and population distribution and plan health care monitoring in liberia. I think the only thing comparable to this feeling is discovering VLC to play video files as a teenager.

harabat 4y ago
I'm trying to find a good project to work on to start learning QGIS, and what you described sounds interesting. Would you happen to have a write-up of this?
- jFriedensreich 4y ago
  sorry not really, but i recommend something where you have an interesting question and at least one dataset you need. A nice starting point is always to get some of your private data exported google and others have about your location history and come up with nice questions. another approach is to browse the plenty of public datasets and use gapminder for inspiration about topics or questions you want to answer.

twelvechairs 4y ago

QGIS is absolutely one of the biggest open source success stories. Its interesting to see the funding and delivery of new features is largely done in Europe where in the US it is extrmely hard to not use ESRI products. A couple of packages used by qgis worth calling out - postgis which really grew up with qgis, and pdal which is a relatively new but incredible package for working with point cloud data.

Helmut10001 4y ago
Yes, Europe is going the OSS path. I work at University and almost everyone I know in GIS fields switched to QGIS in the past 5 years. Most government departments are also (trying) to switch, some succeeded already (others are waiting for important people to enter pension, so their replacements are more OSS minded).
- culi 4y ago
  It'd be funny to see English's status as the modern lingua franca get overthrown simply due to our government's refusal to embrace FLOSS

015UUZn8aEvW 4y ago

QGIS is very powerful, but it's not exactly user friendly. The UI is hard to learn, and important functionality is buried several layers deep in non-intuitive drop-down menus and buttons. I think a simplified GIS program with stripped-down functionality and an intuitive UI could be a big hit. Think of SketchUp versus SolidWorks or ProE.

hummus_bae 4y ago
No argument there. I've worked with ArcGIS, Autocad, Sketchup, Civil3D, and QGIS. Though clumsy, QGIS is the most powerful by far of these applications.
bostonvaulter2 4y ago
In many ways that is what we're building at Felt (where I work). We don't offer much in the way of analysis, but we make it very easy (IMO of course) to share your maps. Here's a couple maps that I have made about the Honoulu marathon that I wouldn't have made in a more complex/time-intensive piece/powerful piece of software: - https://felt.com/map/UNOFFICIAL-Honolulu-Marathon-2022-TCg9CKrVlRDiZqwY8UArBtC https://felt.com/map/UNOFFICIAL-Honolulu-Marathon-2022-TCg9C... - https://felt.com/map/UNOFFICIAL-Honolulu-Marathon-2022-Road-Closures-Cb0NhIc3TPafRBLBqUwYJD https://felt.com/map/UNOFFICIAL-Honolulu-Marathon-2022-Road-...
- kilolima 4y ago
  Nice maps but why do you have to share with the world a map of North Shore surf spots?
trynewideas 4y ago
I think part of the question (and problem) is, which part of QGIS do you focus on? The digitizing and geometry parts? The map-rendering part? Georeferencing? Vector and raster analysis? Or to put it another way, what's the workflow that a simpler, more opinionated interface would solve, and what features could or would you sacrifice for it?
- 4y ago

jtmiclat 4y ago

Just FYI for all QGIS fans, QGIS had a recent call for funding. https://blog.qgis.org/2023/01/16/crowd-funding-call-2023/ https://blog.qgis.org/2023/01/16/crowd-funding-call-2023/

CSSer 4y ago
This took me way too long to find: https://donate.qgis.org/ https://donate.qgis.org/
- luketaylor 4y ago
  Looks like they have Github sponsors set up too: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS https://github.com/qgis/QGIS

ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago

I used to program python plugins for QGIS, I really miss it. It made me feel really useful, I'd write visualization algorithms one day and the next it was deployed to the whole company and people would email me telling me how much easier it made their job. I don't think I've ever felt this valued since, every other job I had was a small part of a big whole. I'd kill to find a full remote job doing that.

lukeqsee 4y ago
Can you email me luke <at> stadiamaps.com? I would love to chat about QGIS plugins, and we may be able to sponsor you to build one.
vsharma-next 4y ago
Hello, would love to chat with you about QGIS plugins. Email me at devjobs@anor.io if you would be interested in making a QGIS plugin for the solar PV industry :)

hawski 4y ago

I would like QGIS to have a REPL with autocompletion. Where do people with QGIS knowledge hang out (especially devs)?

glonq 4y ago
What coordinate system would you like the answer in? ;)
- defrost 4y ago
  Ideally a conformal mapping projection with minimum scale error. I'm saddened that complex-number polynomial expansion fell out of vogue and fear that was the last wall that kept the muggles out of hard core map projections.
trynewideas 4y ago
https://thespatialcommunity.org/ https://thespatialcommunity.org/ and https://discord.com/invite/nkmGYttFhH https://discord.com/invite/nkmGYttFhH to start.

noja 4y ago

https://anna.ps/blog/how-to-use-land-registry-data-to-explore-land-ownership-near-you https://anna.ps/blog/how-to-use-land-registry-data-to-explor...

joxel 4y ago

Getting paid to do GIS made me realize I needed to learn to code because it sucked

shoo 4y ago
Do you still do GIS through code or have you escaped entirely?

idleprocess 4y ago

I love exploring open GIS datasets with QGIS. It's incredible what this tool can do and I keep discovering new features or plugins all the time, which keeps it interesting. The amount of publicly available GIS data combined with tools like QGIS and PostGIS can be a big time saver. I don't work in the space, but occasionally run into problems requiring some form of support for geospatial data. Need a list of US cities and postal codes along with their respective coordinates? Easy. Find the dataset, import into QGIS, export to PostGIS. Done.

crtified 4y ago

I spent a decade in the GIS space, ending back around the final days of ArcGIS 9.x, or very early days of 10.x. I also remember various alternative and early open source efforts of the time. Then, about a year ago, after several years away from the scene, I got some mojo back and started investigating modern QGIS. I was very pleasantly surprised, it immediately felt like an upgrade from what I used to use. And also felt like coming home, in that it was obvious and intuitive how to accomplish the standard functions. If someone had put me in (that famous thing) a blindfolded time machine for a zero-year trip, popped me out, put me in front of QGIS and said "Welcome! This is ArcGIS 9.6!", it wouldn't have been at all unbelievable. If you know what I mean. No it's not perfect. Casually and hastily wing your way around a project, copypasting here and there, setting up all kinds of parameters and advanced display bits&bobs, and - like most complex geospatial software - you'll, once in awhile, find yourself unceremoniously dumped out onto the desktop with a software error. So a highly robust and restore-able workflow is still essential. But regardless it's up there with the very best packages I've ever used.

Bedon292 4y ago
Interesting, I have had the opposite experience to that. I spend a lot of time in ArcGIS late 9.x. and early 10.x and QGIS is not even remotely intuitive to me. You can drop me in ArcGIS Desktop or Pro years later and I can still intuit how to do everything, but I have to Google how to do anything in QGIS.
anakaine 4y ago
If you can, get yourself in front of an up to date version of ArcGIS Pro for a little while. The user interface will feel entirely different, and some people don't like it because it's different, but the entire package feels significantly better. Importantly, a good deal, though not all, of the infuriatingly frustrating "random esri error for who knows what reason" issues have been resolved, and continue to improve.

amluto 4y ago

I’m slowly making a map of my back yard in QGIS. One annoyance: I live in a place where tectonic movement over my expected lifespan is significant on the scale of my map. And so are the supposed inaccuracies in various coordinate systems. (I want to record where things are so I can find them again without digging big holes!) As far as I can tell, QGIS has no particular understanding of either a coordinate relative to the (moving!) crust or of a coordinate in space-time that can be projected to space at future or past times. Surely this should be a thing! I found HTDP, a web tool that can shift coordinates forward and back in time: https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/TOOLS/Htdp/Htdp.shtml https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/TOOLS/Htdp/Htdp.shtml And I found this discussion: https://www.gpsworld.com/the-effects-of-tectonic-plate-movement-on-the-modernized-2022-nsrs/ https://www.gpsworld.com/the-effects-of-tectonic-plate-movem... But I haven’t found anything easy to use. (I have an RTK-capable GPS and NTRIP data via UNAVCO from a nearby CORS station. I was hoping that storing position relative to such-and-such CORS station as it was on such—and-such date would be straightforwardly doable in QGIS.)

LeonB 4y ago
Wow that’s a pretty interesting (and scary) challenge. I know that the coordinate systems get revised every few years. In Australia we used to use AGD83 then it was revised to GDA94 and more recently to GDA2020 — and this was to account for tectonic shifts. And there’s calculations for transforming from one to the other. That’s the only clues I have on that side of things and I’ve forgotten most of what I’ve known.
- LeonB 4y ago
  Also there’s a concept called “rubber sheeting” for transforming points where you know the amount of error at a bunch of points and you want to transform all the other points by interpolating how much error there would be at those points. The might be useful too, if you’re implementing a solution yourself.
  - trynewideas 4y ago
    Specifically https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/VectorBender/ https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/VectorBender/

chaps 4y ago

Oh very, very much yes. I've been using QGIS for about five years now as the first step in doing any sort of visualization work around GIS data. Better to trust a GIS application than my own bad d3 code :). It's also been absolutely fantastic for changing projections, changing resolutions, merging GIS files, things like that. My only complaint about it is that it can be a little bit slow sometimes. It has to redraw everything if you zoom in. That's especially annoying if you're working with data that has millions of multilines or points. But, as a prototyping engine, that's kind of expected and still better than paying for ArcGIS.

glonq 4y ago

Our project is not big enough to justify tools like ArcGIS. Previously I'd used Global Mapper, which is also commercial but is somewhat more reasonably priced. But I recently gave QGIS a shot and am very happy with what it can do. And the price is right!

patwolf 4y ago

I used QGIS to help me import some terrain into Minecraft. I found a lidar elevation map, used QGIS to visualize it in 3d and tweak some things, and then I was able to use another tool to do the conversion into Minecraft. Definitely an impressive tool.

LeonB 4y ago

Every field has its own “occupational hazards” - I found that with maps and mapping the maps themselves were so fascinating, you could get drawn in and lose a lot of time just… exploring I guess. QGis is great, lots of tools are nice. Generally ESRI sucks up all the oxygen and leaves not enough for innovation and implementations from anyone else. There are a lot of features and capabilities needed in the Geospatial world that do not have reliable, rock-solid open source implementations. (I could’ve provided examples a few years ago but now I’ve forgotten the important details and only have opinions left)

heliodor 4y ago
> There are a lot of features and capabilities needed in the Geospatial world that do not have reliable, rock-solid open source implementations Can you list a few please?

mastax 4y ago

I've been using QGIS a bit for simple things. Viewing OSM road data in a PostGIS database. Viewing geojson files. Everything has been more difficult than I expected, but I think that might just come with the territory. I'm working through PostGIS in Action to try to get the requisite background knowledge. One thing that's frustrated me, and I want to make sure it isn't a misconfiguration on my end, is that QGIS feels really slow. For example, I have a 150MB geojson file which has 300,000 points with associated metadata. Even when I'm zoomed in such that I can only see a few thousand points at a time, if I pan the map over by 50% it takes at least 10 seconds before it loads in the new points. Many long operations seem to take place synchronously on the UI thread, so the whole app is unresponsive while they take place. Clicking the drop down arrow on a PostGIS Schema to view the tables spins for several minutes. No other Postgres tool I have takes that long, so it's not the database. The PostGIS import/export tools were also extremely slow and didn't have progress bars. I'm using 3.24 currently. I don't want to rag on it too hard, but it's really hampered my enthusiasm for working with maps and GIS.

geenew 4y ago
You'd probably be well-served by exporting to some format with a spatial index. GeoJson is just a textfile, not much better than reading in a CSV. The current recommended format is Geopackage (gpkg), which is based on SQLite. Edit: agreed on the slowness of DB connections, I've found that too, including for relatively small locally-hosted DBs.
- mastax 4y ago
  Yeah, converting it to gpkg sped it up a lot, thanks! I assumed that since geojson is completely unsuitable for querying directly, it would load the whole thing into a native in-memory format, but perhaps not.
blacha 4y ago
I don't think geojson is a great format for anything with more than a few MB of data. I wanted to see exactly how bad it is with a largeish datasets, so I exported the New Zealand address dataset[1] with ~2.5M points as a geopackage (750MB) QGIS loads this fine its a little slow when viewing the entire country but when zoomed into city level it is almost instant to pan around. Using ogr2ogr I converted it to ndgeojson (2.5GB), It crashed my QGIS while trying to load it. Using shuf I created a random 100,000 points geojson (~110MB) it was unbearably slow in QGIS while panning around 5+ seconds. I currently use and recommend flatgeobuf[2] for most of my working datasets as it is super quick and doesn't need sqlite to read (eg in a browser). It is also super easy to convert to/from with ogr2ogr ogr2ogr -f flatgeobuf output.fgb input.geojson [1] https://data.linz.govt.nz/layer/105689-nz-addresses/data/ https://data.linz.govt.nz/layer/105689-nz-addresses/data/ [2] https://github.com/flatgeobuf/flatgeobuf https://github.com/flatgeobuf/flatgeobuf

hfbff 4y ago

>A note for my European friends - some of these links might not work from outside the US, as some .gov links tend not to. Is the author assuming you're either from the US or European if you're reading the blog?

otter-in-a-suit 4y ago
I usually post these on LinkedIn and send them to friends - didn’t expect this to gain traction on HN! I’m originally from Germany, hence the bias towards readers from Europe. :)

tonyarkles 4y ago

A couple of years ago I started working with drones and writing a bunch of custom software. One of my pet peeves in the drone industry is that a ton of stuff uses “reinvented wheels” that are drone-specific or product-specific instead of just riffing on open standards. Given that, I decided to spend a day or two and do a bit of a survey of the different open standards that are available around kind of the GIS/mapping world, the aviation world, etc. At this point I didn’t even know about QGIS, but I was happy that instead of reinventing the wheel I already had well-defined file formats etc. to work with. QGIS came a little bit later when I had a bunch of data to analyze. My image metadata wasn’t exactly right for QGIS (and couldn’t have been done that way in real-time anyway), but a 3-line shell script using GDAL converted all of my images into something QGIS could load and draw directly overlaid on top of Google Maps. My flight plans were all done in annotated GeoJSON, which QGIS happily loaded as-is and helpfully split it into the layers I had used under the hood as my data encoding. There were a couple of files that were just plain-old CSV, and QGIS happily ingested those and drew them as points and lines and line segments as appropriate. It’s phenomenally good. Some other people in this discussion have mentioned that the UI is a bit rough and I can’t disagree with that, although I feel the same way about the commercial tools too. It’s a power tool for sure, but it doesn’t take too long to figure out the quirks and build yourself a workflow.

geenew 4y ago

Don't forget, QGIS is one of several projects of OSGeo. A significant part of the fundamentals come from GDAL, another OSGeo project, which is very excellent if you ever need to do some command-line processing of or need a library for raster or vector GIS data. Their licensing isn't perfect - the QGIS installer, for example, more-or-less requires acceptance of a few free-as-in-beer but still proprietary licenses, which are used for some specific raster formats. Still, it's one of the great free software success stories, I think. It definitely feels like they will eventually displace ESRI. Most shops will probably keep ESRI around for some format conversions or niche tasks. However, the day-to-day desktop GIS is almost exclusively QGIS in the places I've worked, if only because you can throw it on any machine you want to without worrying about licensing.

otter-in-a-suit 4y ago
I did call out GDAL, but missed the whole OSGeo ecosystem, I’m afraid. Very cool to hear that QGIS is such a prominent piece of software in professional settings! I’m just a software/data engineer who dabbles in this stuff for fun, so I had no idea. Lots of comments here asserting the same thing. It would be amazing to see OSS (even though not truly FOSS) replace industry giants. I see this happening a lot in my space, where a lot of OSS (mostly Apache, some MIT and consorts) overtakes commercial offerings.
- geenew 4y ago
  > I did call out GDAL I see that now, sorry! Excellent article, by the way, it's very useful to have this kind of writeup. I suspect it's something to do with the distributed installation, and the amount of the required behaviour that is sitting behind completed specifications. Eventually, it will be cheaper for a user to just pay for development of any remaining features they need than pay for licensing. And, the functionality addition is cumulative - pay once, keep forever.
dinkumthinkum 4y ago
I mean I don’t want yo dis ping your experience but no shot. I’m not sure where you worked but esri just is a massively dominant player still. I’m government and infrastructure, which is esri’s primary market, QGIS is nowhere near replacing it on the desktop. Now, QGIS is a great project but we can’t be naive about the situation.

sideband 4y ago

QGIS is fantastic and that team deserves a lot of praise for their work over the years. However, the article calls out using KML as a data source and unfortunately QGIS does not have the best support for KML. One of the reasons KML is still around despite it's faults is because a KML author can easily design a UI for their data in Google Earth, organizing data by folders with descriptions, including pre-defined views and image overlays among other things (a basic example here: https://kmzview.com/5qBGblENff4w0RkQf89J https://kmzview.com/5qBGblENff4w0RkQf89J). Then, anybody who opens that KML in Google Earth gets that same UI. There are a lot of casual consumers of this type of data and this experience is powerful for them. I think QGIS could really broaden their appeal to this casual user base by supporting these well-loved KML features.

otter-in-a-suit 4y ago
TIL. I used what I got from my rural county’s website / GIS (hence kml) - I wonder if I could get proper shape files by calling their GIS department.
- dvdkon 4y ago
  Shapefiles are no more proper than KML, I'd even say KML is a better format, since it's a single file and doesn't have the archaic name limitations of SHP.
  - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
    Shapefiles are faster to read.
  - anakaine 4y ago
    KMLs do not have a spatial index. Reading a properly constructed shapefile with 2m points is fine, and running a SQL query on it is also fine. Trying to do that with an xml based file is not fine. Each of the major GIS packages spends quite a bit of effort to convert kml to an in memory spatially indexed dataset on ingestion. Shapefile conversely does not have to sit entirely in memory to still be reasonably quick. Shapefiles do have the anyone field name length limit, among a few other things, but alternate formats that recognise that issue have existed and been popular for well over 20 years. In other news, geopackage is based upon sqllite, supports long field names, a good assortment of data types, and is finding good adoption among many facets of spatial products from desktop to scripting, etc.

grahar64 4y ago

QGIS is great, used it to cut out laser cut maps as presents for my neighbors. Has a steep learning curve but ton of online help.

Phithagoras 4y ago

QGIS is great, I use it daily and I hugely prefer it (and it's mobile equivalent Qfield) to ArcGIS and FieldMaps. The educational world is pretty split between ArcGIS and QGIS. Students don't want to pay over $100 for a yearly ArGIS student license, but more advanced geostatistical analysis isn't supported yet on QGIS. Progress is slower in industry, especially in larger companies. Other critical software like Autodesk, Vulcan, DESWICK, MODFLOW, and Leapfrog already work (somewhat) smoothly with ArcGIS. QGIS is just another thing to go wrong in managers minds, and there is zero opensource progress in developing applications as powerful as QGIS in geomatics adjacent fields.

heliodor 4y ago
Can you provide a few examples please for your statement: "but more advanced geostatistical analysis isn't supported yet on QGIS"? I'd like to hear more about this.

jokoon 4y ago

I remember trying it once, it's quite bloated. I'd rather use simplified command line things instead. For example I don't even remember how to generate raster tiles if I want to host my own maps, I don't think openstreetmap distribute the software they use to make their tiles, out they don't really document how to do it. So like most open source initiatives, it's not all good.

urschrei 4y ago
QGIS isn’t bloated, it’s a big tool for a big problem space. You can’t use “simplified command line things” for a vast majority of GIS tasks, if only because they require visual interactivity. That having been said, why on earth would you want to use a GUI application to generate raster tiles? The only input required is an extent and a zoom level. Use GDAL or any of ten other free and open-source command-line tools readily available. It sounds like you’re leaving a dismissive drive-by comment rooted largely in your misunderstanding of a large and complex field with use cases which are largely disjoint. Analysts need GUIs and a lot of different analytics tools. People making web maps don’t.

zzleeper 4y ago

I'm quite late to the thread, but has anyone found out a way to use QGIS programmatically? For research you often want to write routines that you can re-run in the future (replicability, reproductibility, etc.) and it's very easy to do so with statistical software (Stata, R, even Py) but with QGIS I just have a README saying "click here, click there, etc.". Tried to wrap everything in a QGIS Python script once, but it was impossible as there was not a one-to-one translation between clicks and code.

ungawatkt 4y ago
It wasn't 1-1 with clicks, and it took a ton of trial and error, but I managed to get there eventually with a project. Here's the passable write up I made for it, theres a link to the final script towards the end, hopefully theres enough to be helpful. https://www.odinseye.cloud/musings/qgis_scripting/ https://www.odinseye.cloud/musings/qgis_scripting/

a1371 4y ago

A couple of weeks ago I got a point cloud file with no clue about how to open it. Sure enough QGIS came to rescue and I learned it has a 3D view as well. I'm grateful for it :)