Tag: qfieldcloud

Throughout the week, in workshops, presentations, and project showcases, a consistent theme emerged: QField is not just “the mobile companion to QGIS,” it is production infrastructure for complete field-to-cloud-to-desktop workflows.

It was incredible to see how present QField was throughout FOSS4G 2025 in Auckland. With around 20 presentations and workshops featuring QField, the conference showcased a wide range of real-world, production-grade use cases across many sectors.

What stood out was not just the number of talks, but how consistently QField was presented as a trusted, operational tool rather than an experiment.

The QField Ecosystem in Practice

QGIS Desktop for project design, analysis, and quality assurance QField for field capture, with offline-first capabilities when connectivity is limited QFieldCloud for real-time synchronization, team coordination, and project management Plugins and APIs for integration into broader organizational systems

This ecosystem approach transforms field data collection from an isolated task into an integrated workflow. It’s the difference between “collecting points” and “running a programme.”

QField Day: A Community Deep Dive

Early in the conference, QField Day brought together practitioners, developers, and decision-makers for a focused exploration of the platform’s capabilities. The day emphasized practical implementation—what’s possible now, and what organizations are already achieving in production environments.

Workshops

Complete Lifecycle Management

The QField & QFieldCloud workshop covered the full data collection cycle: project setup in QGIS Desktop, field deployment with QField, synchronization through QFieldCloud, and integration back into desktop workflows for analysis and quality control. Participants worked through the entire pipeline, from initial design to final deliverables.

Field-to-Analysis Integration

One workshop demonstrated the speed of modern field-to-cloud-to-analysis workflows by using Auckland itself as a live laboratory. Participants collected ground truth data with QField, then fed it directly into machine learning workflows running in Digital Earth Pacific’s Jupyter environment.

Plugin Development

For developers, the plugin authoring workshop signaled platform maturity. QField’s plugin framework—built on QML and JavaScript—enables organizations to extend core functionality for specific operational requirements. Custom forms, specialized integrations, and domain-specific interfaces can be developed to address the edge cases that real field programmes encounter.

Operational Workflows: Digital Earth Pacific

• QField participatory mapping integration into Digital Earth Pacific demonstrated the technical workflow connecting field data collection to analysis infrastructure, using Digital Earth Pacific’s open data cube and Jupyter tooling.
• Identifying Forest Invasive Species in Fiji and Tonga Using Machine Learning showed this workflow in action. Field teams collect confirmed invasive species locations using QField, then train detection models using time-series satellite data, iterating with domain experts and local partners to refine results.

Production Deployments

Conservation Operations

Zero Invasive Predators showed QField and QFieldCloud integrated into operational fieldwork for predator eradication programmes across New Zealand. Planning happens in QGIS, capture in QField, and coordination through QFieldCloud—enabling systematic management of conservation campaigns across remote terrain.

Government-Scale Implementation

Finland’s National Land Survey presented their use of QField as part of national topographic data production infrastructure, deployed alongside QGIS and PostGIS. This represents enterprise validation: a national mapping agency selecting QField for production topographic surveying.

Precision Agriculture

Smart vineyards with QGIS & QField demonstrated advanced symbology, map themes, and structured capture workflows supporting precision agriculture operations—showing that the platform handles the level of detail and complexity that professional workflows require.

Developer Infrastructure and Sustainability

• QFieldCloud API — programmatic integration for organizations with existing systems, enabling automation, custom integrations, and connection to enterprise infrastructure
• Who Pays Your Bills? — a transparent discussion of sustainable open-source business models
• [Re]discover QField[Cloud] — platform maturity often manifests as steady capability growth driven by real field workflows

Context: Open Tools for Public Good

• Mapping the World, Empowering People: QField’s Vision in Practice connected QField’s technical capabilities to public-good outcomes
• Open-source road infrastructure management and digital twin direction demonstrated that open standards and open tooling are increasingly part of serious infrastructure conversations

Looking Forward

FOSS4G 2025 Auckland was all about the conversations, and our small booth quickly became a popular meeting point — the QField caps were gone within half a day. We demonstrated the tight integration of Happy Mini Q GNSS with QField, showing how sub-centimeter positioning can be used seamlessly in real field workflows. The booth also featured EGENIOUSS , an EU project where QField complements GNSS with visual localisation for accurate positioning in challenging environments like urban canyons.

Thank you to everyone who shared your workflows, challenges, and stories — whether in presentations, workshops, or over coffee. These conversations remind us that we’re building tools for real people doing important work, and that’s what keeps this community moving forward together.

Focused on stability and usability improvements, most users will find something to celebrate in QField 3.2

Main highlights

This new release introduces project-defined tracking sessions, which are automatically activated when the project is loaded. Defined while setting up and tweaking a project on QGIS, these sessions permit the automated tracking of device positions without taking any action in QField beyond opening the project itself. This liberates field users from remembering to launch a session on app launch and lowers the knowledge required to collect such data. For more details, please read the relevant QField documentation section .

As good as the above-described functionality sounds, it really shines through in cloud projects when paired with two other new featurs.

First, cloud projects can now automatically push accumulated changes at regular intervals. The functionality can be manually toggled for any cloud project by going to the synchronization panel in QField and activating the relevant toggle (see middle screenshot above). It can also be turned on project load by enabling automatic push when setting up the project in QGIS via the project properties dialog. When activated through this project setting, the functionality will always be activated, and the need for field users to take any action will be removed.

Pushing changes regularly is great, but it could easily have gotten in the way of blocking popups. This is why QField 3.2 can now push changes and synchronize cloud projects in the background. We still kept a ‘successfully pushed changes’ toast message to let you know the magic has happened 🚀

With all of the above, cloud projects on QField can now deliver near real-time tracking of devices in the field, all configured on one desktop machine and deployed through QFieldCloud. Thanks to Groupements forestiers Québec for sponsoring these enhancements.

Other noteworthy feature additions in this release include:

• A brand new undo/redo mechanism allows users to rollback feature addition, editing, and/or deletion at will. The redesigned QField main menu is accessible by long pressing on the top-left dashboard button.
• Support for projects’ titles and copyright map decorations as overlays on top of the map canvas in QField allows projects to better convey attributions and additional context through informative titles.

Additional improvements

The QFieldCloud user experience continues to be improved. In this release, we have reworked the visual feedback provided when downloading and synchronizing projects through the addition of a progress bar as well as additional details, such as the overall size of the files being fetched. In addition, a visual indicator has been added to the dashboard and the cloud projects list to alert users to the presence of a newer project file on the cloud for projects locally available on the device.

With that said, if you haven’t signed onto QFieldCloud yet, try it! Psst, the community account is free 🤫

The creation of relationship children during feature digitizing is now smoother as we lifted the requirement to save a parent feature before creating children. Users can now proceed in the order that feels most natural to them.

Finally, Android users will be happy to hear that a significant rework of native camera, gallery, and file picker activities has led to increased stability and much better integration with Android itself. Activities such as the gallery are now properly overlayed on top of the QField map canvas instead of showing a black screen.