Tag: en_gb

🚀 QField has officially hit 1 million downloads – thanks to you! 🎉

Let’s not beat around the bush: QField has hit 1+ million downloads. What started as an ambitious open-source project has transformed into a global tool that’s changing how professionals collect spatial data in the field. This big milestone is the result of years of dedication, with over 50,000 hours invested by our team. Our GeoNinjas contributed 14% of QGIS, while also driving open-source projects like ModelBaker and SwissLocator.Thank you for making GIS nerds the unsung heroes of fieldwork everywhere. Here’s to changing the world, one field at a time!

🚀 GET QFIELD NOW

From Switzerland to the world!🇨🇭

Born in the Swiss Alps, raised by open-source, and now roaming the globe, QField has gone international! What started in Switzerland is now in the hands of field mappers, researchers, and GIS pros on six continents. Thank you for taking QField worldwide! 🌍

Mapping the world one field at a time.

The numbers tell a story 📖

One million downloads might sound like just a number, but for us, it represents something much bigger. It’s 1'000'000 times someone chose an innovative, flexible mobile mapping solution. It’s 1’000’000 instances of fieldwork made easier, more efficient, and more accurate.

From humble beginnings to over 1 million downloads, QField has officially gone from “little app that could” to “open-source overachiever. ” Thanks to the power of open source (and probably some caffeine).

QField has hit 1 million downloads in over 150 countries.

QField’s top user countries 🏆

QField’s passport is full! 🌍 We’re blown away by how far our geospatial tool has travelled: from mountaintops to city blocks, you’re mapping it all. Our amazing global user community is making QField a true #DigitalPublicGood.A map made in heaven! 💚

Mapping knows no borders, just like QField’s growing community.

More than just an app 📱

This cross-platform flexibility helps professionals collect GIS data anywhere, anytime. QField goes wherever you do. Android? Check. iOS? Check. Desktop? Check. If it has a screen, we’re probably on it. Collect GIS data anywhere, anytime.

QField isn’t just software, it’s a community-driven project that turns complex geospatial challenges into precise, actionable data. Every download represents a connection to our core mission: making professional-grade mobile GIS accessible, reliable, and straightforward.

QField’s Journey: Mapping our milestones 📍

Our roadmap is packed with milestones and highlights that will continue to push the boundaries of mobile GIS.

QField toQFieldCloud ☁️

You can play a key role in the sustainable growth of QField, the open-source digital good. Your support  can take many forms, like contributing… or:

This not only streamlines and enhances your fieldwork but also gives you access to the full QField ecosystem with all its advantages. At the same time, you directly contribute to the continuous improvement of QField, ensuring its impact grows for everyone.

💚 SUPPORT US

The latest releases of MovingPandas and Trajectools come with many “under the hood” changes that aim to make your movement analytics faster:

1. Instead of immediately creating a GeoPandas GeoDataFrame and populating the geometry column with Point objects, MovingPandas now has “lazy geometry column creation” that holds off on this operation until / if the geometries are actually needed. This way, for many operations, no geometry objects have to be generated at all.
2. MovingPandas TrajectorySplitters now support parallel processing and Trajectools uses parallel processing whenever available (e.g. for adding speed & direction metrics, detecting stops, splitting trajectories).
3. When a minimum length is specified for trajectories, MovingPandas now avoids computing the total trajectory length and, instead, immediately stops once the threshold value has been reached (“early skip”).
4. Trajectools now offers the option to skip computation of movement metrics (speed & direction). This way, we can skip unnecessary computations and leverage the lazy geometry column creation, wherever applicable.

Let’s have a look at some example performance measurements!

Example 1: MovingPandas ValueChangeSplitter

The ValueChangeSplitter splits trajectories when it detects a value change in the specified column. This is useful, for example, to split up public trajectories that contain a “next_stop” column.

The following graph shows ValueChangeSplitter runtimes for different minimum trajectory length settings (from 0 to 1km, 100km, and 10,000km):

We see that the new, lazy geometry column initialization outperforms the old original code in all cases (e.g. 57% runtime reduction for 1km), except for the worst-case scenario, when the original implementation discards all trajectories as too short right from the start. (For most use cases, min_length will be set to rather small values to avoid creation of undesired short trajectory fragments, similar to sliver polygons in classic geometry operations.)

Additionally, we can engage multiprocessing by setting the n_processes parameter, e.g. to the number of CPUs to achieve further speedup:

Example 2: Trajectools

By applying all above-mentioned speedup techniques, Trajectools is now considerably faster. For example, the following runtime reductions can be achieved by deactivating the “Add movement metrics (speed, direction)” option in the algorithm dialog:

• Create trajectories: 62%
• Spatiotemporal generalization (TDTR): 78%
• Temporal generalization: 81%
• Split trajectories at stops: 53%

I have also updated the default trajectory points output style. It now uses a graduated renderer to visualize the speed values (if they have been calculated) instead of the previously used data-defined override. This makes the style faster to customize and provides a user-friendly legend:

For more infos, have a look at:

• MovingPandas 0.22 release notes
• Trajectools 2.6 release notes

Enjoy the latest performance increases!

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

As long time sponsors of FOSSGIS, we stepped up the game this year and became Platinum Sponsors for FOSSGIS 2025. We are proud to be part of a thriving open-source GIS community and to contribute to such a great conference. Here’s a recap of everything we were involved in:

🚀 Talks & Presentations

🌍 QField: New Strategy and Application Potential
Berit and Marco presented how QField, with over 1 million downloads and 350,000 active users, is now recognized as Digital Public Good aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Marco also shared the vision and mission behind QField’s development — highlighting our commitment to empowering field teams across the globe with open, user-friendly tools for data collection.
Real-world stories illustrated how QField helps bridge data gaps to support informed, sustainable decision-making.
👉 View talk

⚙️ QField in Practice: Fieldwork Made Easy
Berit and Michael led an interactive workshop demonstrating how to develop a QField project from scratch. The goal was for each participant to create and sync their own field study project using QFieldCloud, focused on collecting data on flowering plants in the picturesque “Schlussgarten.”
👉 View session

🌐 When Web Meets Desktop
Matthias demonstrated how Django can be used to build consumable geodata layers via OGC API - Features endpoints. His talk covered how to use Python and Django ORM to elegantly define data models and business logic, offering an alternative to complex database logic.
👉 View talk

☁️ Extending QFieldCloud – Ideas and Practical Examples
Michael showed how QFieldCloud can be extended with Django apps, sharing practical implementations such as automated project generation and integration of remote sensing workflows.
👉 View talk

fossgis25-poster-extending-qfc Download

🔌 QField Plugins – Examples and Possibilities
In a lightning talk, Michael introduced useful QField plugins, explained how to install and use them, and explored how they can enhance your mobile GIS workflows.
👉 View talk

🧪 Hands-on qgis-js: Building Interactive QGIS-Based Web Maps
In this practical workshop, Michael guided participants through using qgis-js, an exciting new project that brings QGIS functionality directly into the browser.
👉 View session

💬 QGIS AMA Expert Session
Matthias and Marco hosted a live Q&A session where attendees could ask everything about QGIS development, best practices, organisation and real-world applications.

🤝 At the Booth

Our QField booth was buzzing with activity all week – from plugin demos and project showcases to deep dives into QFieldCloud and field mapping workflows. We had great conversations, received valuable feedback, and met many enthusiastic users.

💚 Supporting Open Source

We were proud to be Platinum Sponsors of FOSSGIS 2025. Supporting open-source events like this is essential for fostering innovation, collaboration, and community-driven growth in the GIS world.

👋 Looking Ahead

Thank you to the organisers, speakers, and everyone who joined us in Münster. We left the event full of ideas, motivation, and appreciation for this community – and we’re already looking forward to the next FOSSGIS!

#QField #QFieldCloud #FOSSGIS2025 #OpenSourceGIS #QGIS #SupportOpenSource

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

The “Security project for QGIS” is now public ! Pledge now !

The goal of this project is to mutualize funding to improve QGIS security to the highest levels.

Oslandia and other involved partners, especially OPENGIS.ch are OpenSource “pure players” and main contributors to QGIS. This project is an initiative by Oslandia and is endorsed by the QGIS.org association. We work closely with the community of developers, users and stakeholders of QGIS. This project involves QGIS core committers willing to advance QGIS security.

Global context

New regulations like NIS2 and CRA in Europe, as well as other international or local regulations will be activated within the next couple of years. They require software and software producers to improve their cybersecurity practices. OpenSource softwares, while usually having a special treatment, are concerned too. Estimated costs of CRA impact on an opensource project amounts to +30%.

As for QGIS, we consider that the project stays behind what would be sufficient to comply with these regulations. We also do not fulfill requirements coming from our end-users, in terms of overall software quality regarding security, processes in place to ensure trust in the supply chain, and overall security culture in the project.

We have been discussing this topic with clients having large deployments of QGIS and QGIS server, and they stressed the issue, stating that cybersecurity is one of their primary concerns, and that they are willing to see the QGIS project move forward in this area as soon as possible. QGIS faces the risk of IT departments blocking QGIS installations if they consider the project not having enough consideration for security.

Also, requests to security@qgis.org have grown significantly.

Project goals

Oslandia, with other partners and backed by clients and end-users, launch the “Security project for QGIS” : we identified key topics where security improvements can be achieved, classified them, and created work packages to work on, with budget estimations.

• The main goal is simple : raise the cybersecurity level for the QGIS project
• Fulfill cybersecurity requirements from regulations and end-users
• Make QGIS an example of security-aware OpenSource project, helping other OSGeo projects to improve

While QGIS and QGIS server are the main components on which this project focus, improving QGIS security as a whole also needs to consider underlying libraries ( e.g. GDAL/OGR, PROJ, GEOS…).

This project is a specific effort to raise the level of security of QGIS. Maintaining security in the long term will need further efforts, and we encourage you to sponsor QGIS.org, becoming a sustaining member of QGIS.

Memory safety, signing binaries, supply chain management, contributing processes, plugin security, cybersecurity audits and much more topics are included in this project. You can see all items as well as work packages on the dedicated website :

https://security.qgis.oslandia.com

Project organization – Pledge !

Any organization interested in improving QGIS security can contribute to funding the project. We are looking for an estimated total amount of 670K€, divided into 3 work packages Pledge now !

Once funded, Oslandia and partners will start working on Work Package 1 in 2025. We intend to work closely with the QGIS community, QGIS.org, interested partners and users. Part of the work are improvements over the current system, other require changes to processes or developer’s habits. Working closely with the user and developer’s community to raise our security awareness is fully part of the project.

We will deliver improvements in 2025 and until 2027. You can see the full list of topics, work packages and estimated budget on the project’s dedicated page : security.qgis.oslandia.com . You are invited to participate, but also to help spread the word and recruit other contributors !

We want to especially thank Orange France for being a long-time supporter of OpenSource in general and QGIS particularly, and the first backer of the Security Project for QGIS !

Should you have any question, or need further material to convince other stakeholders, get in touch !

This year, OPENGIS.ch celebrated its 10th anniversary in Bern, with an afternoon full of workshops attended by clients, long-term friends, and colleagues. Here, we will give a glimpse of QField: its vision, where it’s headed, and the exciting features future users can look forward to.

QField was created on June 8th, 2011, with its first commit titled “ added first script”. Since then, it has grown into a powerful tool with a clear vision for the future: to empower people to map and understand the world, tackle daily challenges, and address global issues. Over the next ten years, QField aims to make this vision a reality for everyone, everywhere.

Layers of cake, designed by QField ecosystem’s leading team members, were explained with 2034 in mind: intuitive and accessible to anyone wanting to map our world, while pioneering an innovative and collaborative app for the geospatial community. And last but not least: building strong and engaged communities to drive further adoption of the QField ecosystem.

This vision is taking shape through the forging of strategic partnerships with geospatial stakeholders: hardware manufacturers, ambassadors, trainers and technological partners. For the team, it is clear that good collaboration is key to building a healthy and sustainable ecosystem. Community as well as financial sustainability can become a strong reality with user groups, sponsors and crowdfundings.

And then it became reality: In the summer of 2024, heavy rains caused severe flooding in Switzerland and, suddenly, QField became a vital tool for supporting emergency response through data surveys and photo documentation.

With this emotional story, the technical lead, Mathieu took over and shared other QField success stories and several mapping use cases with partners in Finland and Tonga. But seamless fieldwork wouldn’t be possible without QFieldCloud, so Ivan provided an insight into the last years’ QFieldCloud enhancements, before diving into the busy server-side roadmap for 2025, which includes many new features related to the authentication, security, internationalization and performance. Finally, Zsanett shared QField product news and updates, including new storage capacities like WebDAV and new packaging capabilities. Last but not least, the new Fangorn version introduces new features developed by the evolving QField Community.

Building communities by sharing thoughts and ideas for the ecosystem is now possible through the ideas.qfield.cloud platform, open to everybody to suggest new ideas for QField.

The final topping of the (layer) cake: the new QField plugin framework was presented to the workshop attendees by Mathieu, who explained how the field workflow can be enhanced and optimized through the development of plugins – unique extensions that further personalize QField. For example, with the Routing Plugin, users can compute optimal ways between locations directly in QField using an external API. To make team efforts in the field even more efficient, the Live Location Plugin allows each team member to see the location of other members on the QField map, preventing debilification in the field.

Last but not least, the workshop ended with a Q&A session, where several topics were addressed such as virtual reality, AI, machine learning, etc. This was followed by a happy and cheerful welcome drink with OPENGIS.chpartners. 🍻