[HN Gopher] QGIS is the mapping software you didn't know you needed
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QGIS is the mapping software you didn't know you needed
Author : otter-in-a-suit
Score : 114 points
Date : 2023-02-10 17:37 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (chollinger.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (chollinger.com)
| Waterluvian wrote:
| 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_Unleash...
| jjwiseman wrote:
| That's a very cool example of somewhat unconventional QGIS use.
| danuker wrote:
| You could say... you've SLAMmed QGIS onto your robots
| ( *_*)>[?]#-# ([?]#_#)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_...
| mrguyorama wrote:
| 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.
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| 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.
| jtmiclat wrote:
| Just FYI for all QGIS fans, QGIS had a recent call for funding.
|
| https://blog.qgis.org/2023/01/16/crowd-funding-call-2023/
| n8cpdx wrote:
| 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=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 [2]
| 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/
| erremerre wrote:
| ArcGIS is painfully slow. To apply symbology, you need to go to
| toolbox, select apply symbology, select the layers, select the
| symbology file, then make sure to select maintain ranges which
| for an absolute no sense reason is not the default, then click
| on apply.
|
| ArcGIS then proceeds to apply symbology one layer at a time,
| taking between 30 to 75 seconds per layer to apply it.
|
| In QGIS, right click in layer, copy symbology, select other
| layers right click, paste symbology. Done in 3 seconds.
|
| And like that I could be hours and hours talking about similar
| experiences.
|
| ArcGIS might be much more powerful, but honestly it isn't worth
| spending 45 minutes to what in QGIS can be done in 5 minutes.
| clumsysmurf wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
|
| 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.
| crtified wrote:
| What is the justification for paywalling a very basic, old
| GIS function like Raster Georeferencing into an expensive
| "Pro" category?
| dvisca wrote:
| ArcGIS Pro is just the name for the current iteration of
| a desktop suite (after ArcMap). ArcGIS Online lacks many
| of the ,,classic" GIS features, especially raster
| features.
| noja wrote:
| https://anna.ps/blog/how-to-use-land-registry-data-to-explor...
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hawski wrote:
| I would like QGIS to have a REPL with autocompletion.
|
| Where do people with QGIS knowledge hang out (especially devs)?
| alanbernstein wrote:
| 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.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| 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.
| idleprocess wrote:
| 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.
| nobleach wrote:
| 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.
| whoopdeepoo wrote:
| 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
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| The educational world needs to stop supporting them.
| dvisca wrote:
| But it's the other way around. Esri offers so much in the
| education sector apart from software licenses in a complete
| package, which you unfortunately have to search for in the
| FOSS sector.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Sounds remarkably similar to Oracle, or other "too big to
| fail" things that sell ridiculously priced software to CTOs.
| tomrod wrote:
| 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.
| crtified wrote:
| 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.
| jug wrote:
| Meanwhile, some of us are sad sods stuck on having chosen to
| integrate with MapInfo once upon a time...
| joxel wrote:
| [dead]
| lukeqsee wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| trynewideas wrote:
| 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://d
| ocs.qgis.org/3.22/en/docs/training_manual/index.htm...
|
| - 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 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-..., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAcZUPSmqDE
| jjwiseman wrote:
| I found this online course to be pretty useful:
| https://www.udemy.com/course/mapacademy/
| 015UUZn8aEvW wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| cozzyd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| gkamradt wrote:
| 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)
| n1b0m wrote:
| That's beautiful
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