[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 : 393 points
Date : 2023-02-10 17:37 UTC (1 days 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.
| mr337 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Cool presentation, thanks for sharing it.
| geenew wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| patwolf wrote:
| 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.
| mastax wrote:
| 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.
| Bedon292 wrote:
| QGIS is always a little more difficult than expected. Even as
| someone with a masters in GIS, its still hard for me to
| remember where they put things or how to do it. Its extremely
| powerful but can be extremely frustrating too.
|
| GeoJSON is unfortunately one of the worst formats to keep the
| data you are using in. Its great for transport and
| interoperability, but there is no way to index the data in the
| format. It doesn't matter if you are only drawing a few
| thousand points, it is still looking through all of them to see
| which ones to draw.
|
| GIS is awesome, and don't let one tool get you down. If its
| something interesting to you, there is a lot more to it than
| just QGIS. Part of my pain with QGIS is because I rarely ever
| use it so I forget what I learned last time. I spend most of my
| time purely in python, and don't really need to.
| larodi wrote:
| No, you're not victim of misconfiguration. QGIS is very slow
| with large datasets, no matter what source you use (even if you
| have Oracle with costly Spatial extensions). It is due to some
| unfortunate design decisions - the app always loads the full
| dataset from the source, and draws/shaws every single feature.
| It is possible (through some recent, obscure check in the
| prefs) to tell it to skip smaller objects when putting
| everything on the screen, but generally is not possible to tell
| it "do not load features from PostGIS that are going to render
| to only few pixels".
|
| Another reason is that the underlying C++ engine is tied in
| such way with the fairly-large Python codebase, that it seldom
| uses all CPU cores. so you have a single process app. Add to
| this the fact that the GPU is not used extensively and you get
| one very slow APP.
|
| So, yeah, for datasets larger than 50k points its slow on
| arbitrary hardware. Some analysis are impossible to run unless
| you go to PostGIS
|
| To be honest, ESRI is not a company that everyone loves, but
| they really invest into ArcGIS Pro, even though they also are
| not there yet. Both QGIS and ESRI shy away from spatial SQL
| which is like times more effective for spatial analysis.
|
| To be honest, QGIS is quite old-school in design, and the core
| devs know that it would take enormous effort to implement it
| from scratch... at least the slow parts. The fact that it works
| and is open source, does the fundamental things you need does
| not make it the _top_ software. this "opensource ftw" is really
| stupid when you have to work with hundreds of layers with
| hundred Ks of points.
| geenew wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| maptime wrote:
| Make sure you have estimated table metadata turned on,
| otherwise QGIS will run a bunch of queries to understand your
| tables I believe.
|
| We typically use QGIS as a viewing engine only, if you let
| postgis do the heavy lifting it's a beautiful setup, especially
| with a tuned dB and a indexed clustered postgres table
| mastax wrote:
| > Make sure you have estimated table metadata turned on,
| otherwise QGIS will run a bunch of queries to understand your
| tables I believe.
|
| That fixed it, thanks! Looking at the manual, there is a tip
| that tells you to turn that on, otherwise it will _read the
| entire table_ to characterize the geometries... It 's a bit
| mad that the default behavior has it querying potentially
| gigabytes of information across the network every time you
| open the app and click a dropdown, with no progress bar. But
| it's definitely the type of app where you need to read the
| manual, and it says so right there.
| blacha wrote:
| 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/
| [2] https://github.com/flatgeobuf/flatgeobuf
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Can't you use clustering techniques?
| 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.
| harabat wrote:
| 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?
| 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/
| CSSer wrote:
| This took me way too long to find: https://donate.qgis.org/
| luketaylor wrote:
| Looks like they have Github sponsors set up too:
| https://github.com/qgis/QGIS
| 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/
| cavisne wrote:
| This has been downvoted but I have to say, living atlas seems
| like an awesome resource
| 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.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| That's interesting, which product and version of ArcGIS were
| you using?
| kilolima wrote:
| Is this an advertisement for esri or a meaningful comment on
| using QGIS?
| n8cpdx wrote:
| A lot of people this post are trying to reach don't know
| about ArcGIS. As someone who does know about the GIS field,
| it is frustrating to see post after post about how to do GIS
| the hard way. The article is fine, but the whole process
| could have been much easier using the ArcGIS system, and
| instead of a PDF you'd get full REST services and a suite of
| apps to work with them.
|
| This post doesn't mention ArcGIS at all, except for as a data
| source that your county government probably uses.
|
| I remember when I didn't know about ArcGIS and thought it was
| cool to build apps that put points on MapBox maps - which I
| later found out is a waste of time, because ArcGIS already
| does that job well.
|
| I think this post leaves people with the impression that GIS
| is niche, or difficult, or not accessible to lay users. My
| personal opinion is that recent advancements in Web GIS make
| the field about as accessible to people as things like word
| processing, while QGIS is stuck in the ArcMap days, catering
| exclusively to trained GIS professionals.
|
| It is absolutely meaningful to point out that you don't need
| to be a trained data engineer to do this kind of work, and
| that this 4,000 word journey could have been done in 10
| minutes of clicking around user-friendly software.
| 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.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| I think it's just that the web map viewer is a new
| product and that feature hasn't been implemented yet (but
| I'm not on that team and don't know their roadmap). And
| it's not really a paywall thing since the personal use
| license gets you both online and desktop apps including
| Pro.
| anakaine wrote:
| ArcGIS online is absolutely not an alternative to ArcGIS
| Pro. Not even close. Nobody spending more than a small
| amount of time using GIS beyond being an end user is going
| to find online a worthy replacement for Pro. It's a
| publishing platform with a few analytical tools that each
| cost credits to run, not a spatial sciences package. Online
| is good for data capture and integration, but not for
| someone who wants to perform regular or more complex
| analytics.
|
| There are currently no plans to rewrite ArcgGIS pro for M1
| mac hardware according to ESRI. The move to Pro should have
| made it much easier to do, but its still a huge task.
|
| The ESRI community have recently had a lot of success with
| M1/2 hardware, Parallels 17+, Windows 11 arm, and ArcGIS
| Pro. Just note that you won't be making 3d videos with it
| comfortably. Everything else seems to be working very well.
| Jill_the_Pill wrote:
| I feel like Online can do just about nothing with rasters
| or raster analysis, and that is fully half of GIS.
| kilolima wrote:
| Good question! Also why isn't there a Linux version? Maybe
| there is some collusion somewhere between two of the major
| monopolies in desktop computing?
| anakaine wrote:
| Their server offering includes Linux.
|
| Their desktop version doesn't. Their target audience is
| large to very large enterprise. Their customer base is
| overwhelmingly windows based. They know this, so they've
| shrunk their dev costs to account for it.
| ecommerceguy wrote:
| I installed ArcGIS "home edition" in Windows 10 for Arm on an
| M1 via Parallels and it performs rather well. QGis has never
| really been my thing, I guess I learned Arc (3.2) at too
| young an age and this old dog wont (no time) learn new
| tricks.
| 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)?
| trynewideas wrote:
| https://thespatialcommunity.org/ and
| https://discord.com/invite/nkmGYttFhH to start.
| glonq wrote:
| What coordinate system would you like the answer in? ;)
| defrost wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| amluto wrote:
| 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
|
| And I found this discussion:
|
| 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.)
| somat wrote:
| I am doing the same, Mainly I wanted to record where pipes and
| such are located but might as well record buildings, fences and
| trees while there. I was not worried about geologic movement
| but all the global coordinate systems felt very clunky when
| locally mapping at the centimeter level, I finally settled on
| having a well defined surveyed reference point, and using
| meters north and east off that.
|
| Perhaps that would work for you. because while the plate is
| shifting with respect to the globe, everything on that plate
| will maintain the same relative position.
| mindslight wrote:
| Wow, that makes three of us!
|
| I set up my own NTRIP base station at a fixed point in the
| middle of my roof with a hefty bracket, did a PPP survey to
| determine its location once, and am considering everything
| relative to that. This spring when I'm back at the surveying,
| I'll likely do another PPP run and make sure it hasn't moved
| too much. If it has, I guess I'll have to figure out how to
| reconcile that. From what I've gathered, I don't think this
| is too far off from how real surveying works.
|
| I didn't see much reason to use a different unit than
| degrees. Although while I haven't gotten super in depth
| learning QGIS, it feels like there's an impedance mismatch in
| that it seems to be a 2D program that treats degrees as
| linear units (and then applies a fudge factor to degrees
| longitude), rather than a native 3D program. So I'm doing all
| of my collection, point storage, and calculation with scripts
| outside of QGIS, and then only pushing the cooked results to
| QGIS for visualization.
| amluto wrote:
| I don't have a good sense for how far one needs to be from
| one's NTRIP base station, but I'm pretty happy with the
| UNAVCO data I'm getting. The nearest station is operated by
| Serious Professionals, and it won't move if I mess around
| with my roof. :)
| mindslight wrote:
| I've got a professional base station that's decently
| close, but still far enough to degrade the accuracy a bit
| (I forget the exact figure but you can find it if you
| search). When I used the professional base station to
| figure out the point and compared it to what PPP had
| found, it seemed to be within that amount of error.
|
| I chose the part of the roof least likely to be
| disrupted. But if I do need to move it, then I'll have to
| figure out exactly how I want to map to points going
| forward.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Instead of a reference + north/east meters, how about two
| reference points, and then everything is referenced as polar
| coordinates from there, point A to point B being 0 degrees.
| My concern would be if the direction of north/east changed
| over time from the plate movement.
| LeonB wrote:
| 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.
| anakaine wrote:
| Keep in mind too that GDA2020 has an inbuilt calculation for
| drift and will keep your coordinates up to date as time
| progresses.
| amluto wrote:
| I didn't find anything in QGIS to give a layer a CRS and an
| associated date, so I'm not sure how coordinate systems
| like this are expected to work properly.
| LeonB wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Specifically https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/VectorBender/
| 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.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| 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).
| 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
| jakear wrote:
| Is there a better option for raw base tilesets? When making
| my app mapping world tides (https://solunar.pages.dev) I
| tried OSM for instance but it only had raster tiles at LoDPI
| resolutions available. ESRI on the other hand had full vector
| support in a variety of formats^ and provided great docs for
| integrating with FOSS rendering toolkits. The free tier seems
| generous, though once it runs out the price increases
| _sharply_.
|
| ^ For instance, a really neat one that renders ocean features
| in as much detail as the land typically gets
| kabes wrote:
| Load osm data in postgres and generate the tiles yourself
| with something like geoserver/mapserver
| dagw wrote:
| The cost and effort of deploying something like that in
| production is decidedly non-trivial. I know because I've
| done it. Unless you need the customization and
| flexibility such a solution offers, it's rarely worth it.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| Well, the main other player here is Mapbox.
| jakear wrote:
| Mapbox's free tier is an order of magnitude less
| permissive. They even charge for loading their
| JavaScript: $5 per kiloload! Feels like the best approach
| if I'm not trying to commercialize is just to encourage
| people to self-host using their own API key.
|
| Assuming the service ever even gets to 2M tile
| requests/month. That alone would be quite the
| accomplishment.
|
| Though with Gaia going to hell, something new needs to
| come along.
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| The educational world needs to stop supporting them.
| 2devnull wrote:
| Yes, that is the apex of their human capital Ponzi scheme.
| But, you'd have to wait until the current profs who only
| know esri retire. Or until they put in the effort to learn
| how to use foss tools. The only motivation they might have,
| is a strong belief in foss or pressure from students who
| know esri is a trap.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| That's not a very good take. Esri is not a Ponzi scheme
| in any way. There isn't an alternative for serious GIS.
| QGIS is a good open source tool but it is nowhere near
| esri.
| tarotuser wrote:
| As a systems engineer who was hired explicitly for a
| massive migration from 2 disparate ArcGIS Enterprise
| environments to an AWS one...
|
| Yeah, there's a massive amount of essential features just
| missing from OSM and QGIS. Like, even the most basic -
| layers. They don't even really exist in OSM side of
| things. Whereas if I'm doing travel-time-bands from
| medical centers, I absolutely must use multiple boundary
| layers.
|
| Then again, I'm an engineer, not a data scientist. My
| colleagues (all data scientists) do all sorts of crazy
| awesome work. Again, unless you're hacking R/python code
| and piecemeal it together, you're using ArcGIS. Then
| again, "ArcGIS Notebook" is a dockerized Jupiter system
| for doing just that in ArcGIS enterprise.
|
| edit: As for me personally, since I'm working in
| geoinformatics, I've been teaching myself the hows and
| whats. Im pretty proficient at both ArcGIS and QGis, as
| I'm trying to learn them side by side.
|
| If I am doing my own projects, I will use QGis. That's
| not even a discussion. I'm not about to use proprietary
| systems to lock up my data.
| sohnakukkar wrote:
| Can you elaborate why layers are needed in travel time
| band type analysis?
| nwallin wrote:
| The business world needs to stop supporting Microsoft
| Office. The creative world needs to stop supporting Adobe
| Photoshop. The industrial design world needs to stop
| supporting Solidworks/AutoCAD. Everyone needs to stop
| supporting Microsoft Windows/Apple OSX. etc.
|
| I've been telling people for years they should be using
| GIMP and Linux but nobody cares. At least Oracle's
| stranglehold seems to be weakening.
| heliodor wrote:
| Have GIMP developers ever discussed usability? Because it
| sure doesn't show!
|
| The alternative to Photoshop is that I gave $40 to
| Pixelmator and now I have an awesome photo editor that
| does plenty.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| You can add matlab to that list.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| What is the alternative for serious GIS? Why should they
| stop?
| 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.
| retcond wrote:
| It's not the software licensing, but the independent
| consulting entourage that's the problem : internal
| confidential big four accountancy information told to me
| without any applicable restrictions on my repeating this
| put the cost of each Oracle database _instance_ deployed in
| the F500 at over one hundred million dollars, due to the
| third party make work.
|
| Ed. "deployed"/"deployment" 0400GMT
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Not having done much in terms of GIS work, I never had to
| deal with ESRI until last week.
|
| I was on a call to ask some ESRI rep to add some labeled
| points to my client's existing map tool. It was a somewhat
| surreal, weird experience where I got the feeling they were
| making the work seem much more difficult than it was. Their
| estimate turned out to insanely off the (my) mark, at eye-
| watering hourly rates.
|
| At first I thought they had enough business and didn't really
| care about us. But reading this thread, it seems I was wrong.
| They are the Oracle of the GIS industry.
| dagw wrote:
| In their (possible) defence, stepping outside the the
| narrow ESRI path of the way you're supposed to do things
| makes your life a massive pain. I used to work for a
| company that (among other things) developed tools for
| clients on top of ArcGIS Online. And I've had many calls
| where a client asks for a small and very reasonable change,
| and I embarrassingly have to explain that that is not the
| 'approved' way doing things in ArcGIS Online, so trying to
| make that change will essentially require us to rewrite a
| whole lot of components more or less from scratch and might
| no even be possible.
|
| I've spent a large number of hours trying to fight ESRI
| software, lost more fights than I've won and even my
| victories have mostly been pyrrhic.
| rat9988 wrote:
| Adding labels to a map in a readable fashion is not an easy
| thing. ArcGis solutions, last time I tried, were way better
| in this space than QGis.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| That author doesn't say Esri is a scourge; more like it's
| just generally bad to have only 1 provider in a space -- and
| that it's up to customers to change that by voting with their
| feet.
|
| I think Esri is (and has been) in a very similar position to
| Microsoft's in the late 1990s -- having achieved market
| dominance, they feel like open source software is the biggest
| threat to their business. But I think the presence of QGIS is
| creating competition, which is nothing but good for the
| industry.
|
| (I worked as a developer for Esri for 15 years)
| 7952 wrote:
| ESRI have similar network effect to Microsoft. No
| individual product is that great but taken together it is
| very competitive. And ArcGIS online is developing that
| network effect in a similar way to Office 365.
|
| Also, the GIS space tends to have crossover between
| different departments in companies. You have a mix of IT
| departments, GIS specialists outside of IT departments
| managing infrastructure, data management, casual users etc.
| Each has a different budget and a different competitive
| environment. ESRI sits as a compromise between these
| different groups. Each group may be able to adopt a
| competitor but not gain traction outside their group.
| 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.
| nine_k wrote:
| What made it problematic to run in prod for you?
| LeonB wrote:
| Splines instead of points -- boom! That sounds awesome.
| jokoon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| chaps wrote:
| 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.
| grahar64 wrote:
| 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.
| glonq wrote:
| 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!
| tonyarkles wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| Bedon292 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| LeonB wrote:
| 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)
| a1371 wrote:
| 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 :)
| sideband wrote:
| 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). 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| anakaine wrote:
| 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.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| Shapefiles are faster to read.
| larodi wrote:
| use PostGIS with proper spatial indices, and properly tuned if
| you have to take the QGIS way. and remember that spatial SQL is
| always better than using python-based analysis. particularly
| with newer versions of Postgre where there is chance that the
| queries be parallelized.
| zzleeper wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
| jug wrote:
| Meanwhile, some of us are sad sods stuck on having chosen to
| integrate with MapInfo once upon a time...
| Phithagoras wrote:
| 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.
| hfbff wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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. :)
| joxel wrote:
| Getting paid to do GIS made me realize I needed to learn to code
| because it sucked
| shoo wrote:
| Do you still do GIS through code or have you escaped entirely?
| 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
| otter-in-a-suit wrote:
| 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... , 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.
| jjwiseman wrote:
| I found this online course to be pretty useful:
| https://www.udemy.com/course/mapacademy/
| jt_b wrote:
| What search terms would one use for finding roles in companies
| like this, as an experienced dev with a strong background in
| GIS and open source tools? E.g. Postgis/Pydata/mapbox-gl et.
| al.
| lukeqsee wrote:
| What type of role are you looking for?
|
| GIS is a _huge_ space, and you could specialize in one niche
| for years or go more general, so it 's really based on what
| you want to do.
|
| I'd say there's three or four general areas: mapping & map
| data (mostly focused on visualization), geocoding & search
| (focused on helping people find things in natural language,
| think text -> coordinates, text -> point of interest ->
| coordinate), routing (focused on the mechanics of getting
| things from point a to point b efficiently), and finally a
| huge, diverse bucket of "other location APIs" (anything from
| geofencing to timezones to ETL specialization).
|
| I'm happy to chat about this. We aren't hiring, but there are
| lots of companies that are.
| 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.
| AlbertoGP wrote:
| Some years ago QGIS was useful to me in spite of its UI: I got
| a PDF map of certain infrastructure that was not georeferenced,
| and I was able to correct its projection to Web Mercator with
| great acccuracy. But at the end I was somehow unable to find
| out how to export the data! QGIS did show me with the
| transformation matrix it had built and I wrote a program that
| applied that matrix to my files.
| anakaine wrote:
| In the vast majority of cases you cannot turn a PDF into
| spatial data, except for georeferencing it as an image. There
| are some exceptions, such as when the PDF already includes
| georeferenced vector data, but its very unlikely you had that
| sort of file given the issue you described.
|
| You likely either: - needed to export an image of the data
| (raster); - needed to digitise the data within; - needed to
| extract the vector data first from the pdf and work out how
| to deal with it.
|
| Opening a pdf without appropriate data structures into a gis
| software package is akin to taking a picture of a billboard
| that has a printed image of a map on it and then expecting to
| be able to do anything with that picture. The pdf is a bit
| better, but not by much unless it began life as a
| georeferenced pdf with vector data maintained.
| AlbertoGP wrote:
| The PDF was a map of infrastructure that was likely
| produced with ArcGIS.
|
| By the time I got it, it was just a vector image.
|
| The infrastructure in question was pipelines, represented
| in the PDF by lines, so georeferencing them was enough to
| get spatial data adequate for the application.
| 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.
| Phithagoras wrote:
| Look to Google Earth and Caltopo.
|
| These two already dominate more casual mapping
| anakaine wrote:
| Not in the GIS world of products they do not. They are thin
| clients for maps, not analytical tools.
| trynewideas wrote:
| 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?
| vekker wrote:
| The most obvious ones. I'm still very new to GIS, but I find
| it amazing how difficult it is to simply draw some rectangles
| (of some specified dimensions) and lines on a map, and
| cleanly label the edges with distances. Annotating, moving,
| rotating things... is quite a pain compared to modern UIs. So
| I wonder if there's a slim and beginner-friendly open source
| version of QGIS.
| trynewideas wrote:
| "Most obvious" is still pretty subjective, though. It
| depends on how you wind up looking for a GIS tool.
|
| - A lot of people come to it wanting to edit or annotate
| existing city/street maps with geometry, like you're
| describing.
|
| - My first encounters with it were trying to plot points on
| a map to build a heat map, in a data analysis context, and
| I was coming from Google Earth/KML.
|
| - The next time, I wanted to georeference raster maps to
| make more accurate vector data, and I was coming from
| Inkscape and Illustrator.
|
| - Another popular use case is to work with topographical
| and height data, which is another workflow with mostly
| another interface in QGIS.
|
| - And all of these can have very different output goals -
| slippy maps with raster or vector tiles, topo maps, 3D
| renderings and prints, GeoJSON and PostGIS data.
|
| The "most obvious" app for each of those use cases would
| each be different, with different interfaces. And I can see
| where that would be good for beginners, or for limited use
| cases, but at some point each of those use cases intersects
| with another. Drawing bike lanes on a map quickly means
| working with topo data. Georeferencing a new base map
| eventually hits plotting POIs and drawing things like
| political borders as geometry. Outputting a heat map from
| data you plot in QGIS can work, but then you need to plug
| it into a database at some point so the data can be updated
| in a shared or automated context.
|
| IMO what would be more useful for QGIS is a ground-up, no-
| assumptions review of its UI similar to what Blender did in
| 2.8/3.0. Find where they can consolidate redundant or
| conflicting tools and interfaces, redesign their
| mouse/keyboard interactions and tool palettes around how
| users intuit they should work, and provide alternate modes
| for the more complex workflows that existing users are
| accustomed to. Blender's redesign proved pretty well that
| an esoteric UI can be streamlined and modernized without
| sacrificing power user workflows.
|
| But I don't know if the QGIS UI community is as large,
| organized, or focused on modern UI design as Blender's,
| which was a rather unique case in FLOSS. And it'd be
| difficult to divorce QGIS's GIS data-editing engine from
| its interface as a whole to build standalone tools with
| smaller UIs focused on tasks instead of toolboxes.
|
| Plugins might be able to do this, which could be an
| interesting approach. Instead of adding features like
| plugins tend to do, one could ship a "flavor" of QGIS with
| pre-installed and -configured plugins that provide
| narrower, task-focused interfaces around existing features.
| bostonvaulter2 wrote:
| 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-TCg9C...
| - https://felt.com/map/UNOFFICIAL-Honolulu-
| Marathon-2022-Road-...
| kilolima wrote:
| Nice maps but why do you have to share with the world a map
| of North Shore surf spots?
| 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)
| prox wrote:
| I can't help but think that archeologists of the future might
| think these are ritual objects of holy places :)
|
| Anyway they look beautiful.
| gkamradt wrote:
| Thank you
| aqfamnzc wrote:
| What are you using to get it into an STL? I've had OK results
| with DEMto3D plugin, but it has some weird artifacts that I
| can't seem to get rid of. Are there any better options you're
| aware of?
| gkamradt wrote:
| I actually use DEMto3D. It's touchy, but I do post-work on
| the .stl/3d model in blender so it works out ok for me.
|
| If you have weird artifacts, I'm guessing that is due to the
| underlying data vs QGIS itself. Have you looked at their
| documentation (https://demto3d.com/en/)?
|
| I outline how the whole process works here https://www.gregka
| mradt.com/gregkamradt/2020/2/29/manufactur...
| otter-in-a-suit wrote:
| Those look phenomenal!
| gkamradt wrote:
| Thank you!
| jtr1 wrote:
| 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
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| There a number of publicly available sources, but I have used
| https://srtm.csi.cgiar.org/
|
| (Near) global coverage, 90m resolution. Easy to fetch tiles
| with a script.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| For the benefit of those who aren't familiar: SRTM was the
| space shuttle radar tomography mission. 30m resolution is
| now available (I remember 30m being released for the first
| time in the 2000s sometime I think).
| defrost wrote:
| USGS provides all their data for free
|
| 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=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).
| gkamradt wrote:
| Where do we get it? Only publicly available sources. Usgs has
| a great portal. Private data is too expensive to get. I was
| quoted 6 figures for a larger area. They were going to fly a
| plane and capture it :)
|
| What resolution? Totally depends on the area the customer
| would like to cover. If it's their ranch or property, we
| usually need 1-meter. If it's a mountain range than 30-Meter
| works.
|
| It mainly depends on the resolution limit for 3D printing. So
| it also depends on the size of the model they want.
|
| Unfortunately not all areas are covered with high res
| defrost wrote:
| Did they quote by line-kilometre flown, any chance of
| sharing the number?
|
| Full multi channel or just LIDAR?
| gkamradt wrote:
| It was one of these two vendors, I forget which:
|
| https://apollomapping.com/digital-elevation-models
| https://www.l3harrisgeospatial.com/Data-
| Imagery/Elevation-Da...
|
| I don't wanna share the number but it was 6 figures
| samstave wrote:
| use these plates on a larger scale to make terra-cotta
| impressions and turn them into 'chia-pets' such that you can
| grow micro greens on the landscape of a particular area.
| gkamradt wrote:
| Ha that would be sweet.
|
| Do you have a video link of what you're referring to?
|
| I once tried to use the molds to make chocolate
| representations of the mountains ha! I learned the hard way
| that tempering is difficult for a novice
| n1b0m wrote:
| That's beautiful
| gkamradt wrote:
| Thank you
| ryantgtg wrote:
| Dang these are sweet!
|
| You have fewer products for sale than I was expecting.
|
| I live in NE Los Angeles, which has the Verdugo and San Gabriel
| mtns, plus Mt Washington and other modest peaks - I think it
| would look great in this style. Especially because all the
| development would be excluded.
| gkamradt wrote:
| The upfront costs are pretty expensive.
|
| For every new location you do the process looks like: 1. Get
| the data and prep it for print (fixed) 2. 3D print it (fixed)
| 3. Rubber Mold (fixed) 4. Wax Model (variable) 5. Bronze
| (variable)
|
| Steps 1-3 are 40-60% of the costs. So I haven't put the money
| out of pocket yet to put up new locations. I've let
| customer's ask first and then do them.
|
| Surprisingly, most of our orders have been custom
|
| Here's my info packet on the custom process
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IkiHG_Z5JS03mWYHv-
| KNAhi8...
| verelo wrote:
| +1 to this, I can think of a few places id order for but i
| couldnt figure out how. Did i miss the link? Looks like it
| refers to "custom orders" but i wasnt sure how that works.
| gkamradt wrote:
| Here's the process on custom orders. I'll put the link
| right on the site to try and avoid confusion.
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IkiHG_Z5JS03mWYHv-
| KNAhi8...
|
| edit: whoops added link
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