We have been continuing our work with the Flagship sponsor of QGIS – Felt to develop their QGIS Plugin – Add to Felt  that makes it even easier to share your maps and data on the web.

What is the ‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin?

The ‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin is a powerful tool that empowers users to export their QGIS projects and layers directly to a Felt web map. This update introduces two fantastic features:

1. Single Layer Sharing: You can now share a single layer from your QGIS project to a Felt map. This means you have greater control over which specific data layers to share, allowing you to tailor your map precisely to your audience’s needs.
2. Map Selection: With the updated plugin, you can choose which map on Felt to add your layer to – a new map, or an ongoing project. This flexibility simplifies your workflow and ensures that your data ends up in the right place.

Businesses that rely on QGIS love how these new features provide a seamless way to view and share results, ultimately allowing them to move more quickly and stay in sync:

“Felt helps us keep each other updated on what we’ve done, what we’ve modeled, how things are progressing.” – ICON Engineering

Why is this Update Important?

Web maps are invaluable tools for sharing data with a wider audience, be it colleagues, clients, or the public. They provide creators with the ability to control data visibility, display options, and audience access, all within an easily shareable digital format. However, creating web maps can be an arduous and complex task.

Here’s where the ‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin update comes to the rescue:

1. Streamlining the Process: Creating web maps traditionally involves website development, data hosting, and map application development—tasks that require a diverse skill set. This complexity can be a significant barrier, especially for smaller operations with limited resources or budget constraints.

2. Felt Simplifies Web Mapping: Felt makes it effortless to create web maps, and share them as easily as you would a Google Doc or Sheet. Simply drag and drop your data, customize the symbology to your liking, and share the map with a link or by inviting collaborators. No need to send large data files or answer questions about the map’s data sources.

3. Integration with QGIS: Now, the ‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin bridges the gap between QGIS and Felt. It seamlessly imports your QGIS data into Felt, eliminating the need for manual data transfers and reducing the complexity of web map creation.

In essence, the ‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin update simplifies the process of sharing and collaborating on web maps. It empowers users to harness the full potential of web-based mapping, making it accessible to everyone, regardless of their technical expertise. The update makes it even easier to share progress updates or model re-run outputs without creating a new map, or sharing a new map link.

So, if you’re a QGIS user looking to enhance your map-sharing capabilities and streamline your workflow, make sure to take advantage of this fantastic update. Say goodbye to the complexities of web map creation and hello to effortless, data-rich web maps with Felt and the ‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin.

How to install and upgrade

• Open QGIS on your computer. You must have version 3.22 or later installed.
• In the plugins tab, select Manage and Install Plugins.
• Search for the ‘Add to Felt’ plugin, select and click Install Plugin.
• Close the Plugins dialog. The Felt plugin toolbar will appear in your toolbar for use.
• Sign into Felt and begin sharing your maps to the web.

If you want more features in this plugin, let us know or you’re interested in exploring how a QGIS plugin can make your service easily accessible to the millions of daily QGIS users, contact us to discuss how we can help!

Who are we?

For those unfamiliar with Oslandia, OpenGIS.ch, or even QGIS, let’s refresh your memory:

Oslandia is a French company specializing in open-source Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Since our establishment in 2009, we have been providing consulting, development, and training services in GIS, with reknown expertise. Oslandia is a dedicated open-source player and the largest contributor to the QGIS solution in France.

As for OPENGIS.ch, they are a Swiss company specializing in the development of open-source GIS software. Founded in 2011, OPENGIS.ch is the largest Swiss contributor to QGIS. OPENGIS.ch is the creator of QField, the most widely used open-source mobile GIS solution for geomatics professionals.

OPENGIS.ch also offers QFieldCloud as a SaaS or on-premise solution for collaborative field project management.

Some may still be unfamiliar with #QGIS ?

It is a free and open-source Geographic Information System that allows creating, editing, visualizing, analyzing, and publicating geospatial data. QGIS is a cross-platform software that can be used on desktops, servers, as a web application, or as a development library.

QGIS is open-source software developed by multiple contributors worldwide. It is an official project of the OpenSource Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and is supported by the QGIS.org association. See https://qgis.org

A Partnership?

Today, we are delighted to announce our strategic partnership aimed at strengthening and promoting QField, the mobile application companion of QGIS Desktop.

This partnership between Oslandia and OPENGIS.ch is a significant step for QField and open-source mobile GIS solutions. It will consolidate the platform, providing users worldwide with simplified access to effective tools for collecting, managing, and analyzing geospatial data in the field.

QField, developed by OPENGIS.ch, is an advanced open-source mobile application that enables GIS professionals to work efficiently in the field, using interactive maps, collecting real-time data, and managing complex geospatial projects on Android, iOS, or Windows mobile devices.

QField is cross-platform, based on the QGIS engine, facilitating seamless project sharing between desktop, mobile, and web applications.

QFieldCloud (https://qfield.cloud), the collaborative web platform for QField project management, will also benefit from this partnership and will be enhanced to complement the range of tools within the QGIS platform.

Reactions

At Oslandia, we are thrilled to collaborate with OPENGIS.ch on QGIS technologies. Oslandia shares with OPENGIS.ch a common vision of open-source software development: a strong involvement in development communities, work in respect with the ecosystem, an highly skilled expertise, and a commitment to industrial-quality, robust, and sustainable software development.

With this partnership, we aim to offer our clients the highest expertise across all software components of the QGIS platform, from data capture to dissemination.

On the OpenGIS.ch side, Marco Bernasocchi adds:

The partnership with Oslandia represents a crucial step in our mission to provide leading mobile GIS tools with a genuine OpenSource credo. The complementarity of our skills will accelerate the development of QField and QFieldCloud and meet the growing needs of our users.

Commitment to open source

Both companies are committed to continue supporting and improving QField and QFieldCloud as open-source projects, ensuring universal access to this high-quality mobile GIS solution without vendor dependencies.

Ready for field mapping ?

And now, are you ready for the field?

So, download QField (https://qfield.org/get), create projects in QGIS, and share them on QFieldCloud!

If you need training, support, maintenance, deployment, or specific feature development on these platforms, don’t hesitate to contact us. You will have access to the best experts available: infos+mobile@oslandia.com.

Growing up, I would spend hours lost in National Geographic maps. The feeling of discovering new regions and new ways to view the world was addictive! It’s this same feeling of discovery and exploration which has made me super excited about Soar’s Digital Atlas. Soar is the brainchild of Australian, Amir Farhand, and is fuelled by the talents of staff located across the globe to build a comprehensive digital atlas of the world’s maps and images. Soar has been designed to be an easy to use, expansive collection of diverse maps from all over the Earth. A great aspect of Soar is that it has implemented Strong Community Guidelines and moderation to ensure the maps are fit for purpose.

Recently, North Road collaborated with Soar to help facilitate their digital atlas goals by creating a QGIS plugin for Soar. The Soar plugin allows QGIS users to directly:

• Export their QGIS maps and images straight to Soar
• Browse and load maps from the entire Soar public catalogue into their QGIS projects

There’s lots of extra tweaks we’ve added to help make the plugin user friendly, whilst offering tons of functionality that power users want. For instance, users can:

• Filter Soar maps by their current project extent and/or by category
• Export raw or rendered raster data directly to Soar via a Processing tool
• Batch upload multiple maps to Soar
• Incorporate Soar map publishing into a Processing model or Python based workflow

Soar will be presenting their new plugin at the QGIS Open Day in August so check out the details here and tune in at 2300 AEST or 1300 HR UTC. You can follow along via either YouTube or Jitsi.

Browsing Soar maps from QGIS

One of the main goals of the Soar QGIS plugin was to make it very easy to find new datasets and add them to your QGIS projects. There’s two ways users can explore the Soar catalog from QGIS:

You can open the Soar Browser Panel via the Soar toolbar button  . This opens a floating catalog browser panel which allows you to interactively search Soar’s content while working on your map.

Alternatively, you can also access the Soar catalog and maps from the standard QGIS Data Source Manager dialog. Just open the “Soar” tab and search away!

When you’ve found an interesting map, hit the “Add to Map” button and the map will be added as a new layer into your current project. After the layer is loaded you can freely modify the layer’s style (such as the opacity, colorization, contrast etc) just like any other raster dataset using the standard QGIS Layer Style controls.

Sharing your maps

Before you can share your maps on Soar, you’ll need to first sign up for a free Soar account.

We’ve designed the Soar plugin with two specific use cases in mind for sharing maps. The first use case is when you want to share an entire map (i.e. QGIS project) to Soar. This will publish all the visible content from your map onto Soar, including all the custom styling, labeling, decorations and other content you’ve carefully designed. To do this, just select the Project menu, Import/Export -> Export map to Soar option.

You’ll have a chance to enter all the metadata and descriptive text explaining your map, and then the map will be rendered and uploaded directly to Soar.

All content on the Soar atlas is moderated, so your shared maps get added to the moderation queue ready for review by the Soar team. (You’ll be notified as soon as the review is complete and your map is publicly available).

Alternatively, you might have a specific raster layer which you want to publish on Soar. For instance, you’ve completed some flood modelling or vegetation analysis and want to share the outcome widely. To do this, you can use the “Publish dataset to Soar” tool available from the QGIS Processing toolbox:

Just pick the raster layer you want to upload, enter the metadata information, and let the plugin do the rest! Since this tool is made available through QGIS’ Processing framework, it also allows you to run it as a batch process (eg uploading a whole folder of raster data to Soar), or as a step in your QGIS Graphical Models!

Some helpful hints

All maps uploaded to Soar require the following information:

• Map Title
• Description
• Tags
• Categories
• Permission to publish

This helps other users to find your maps with ease, and also gives the Soar moderation team the information required for their review process.

We’ve a few other tips to keep in mind to successfully share your maps on Soar:

• The Soar catalog currently works with raster image formats including GeoTIFF / ECW / JP2 / JPEG / PNG
• All data uploaded to Soar must be in the WGS84 Pseudo-Mercator (EPSG: 3857) projection
• Check the size of your data before sharing it, as a large size dataset may take a long time to upload

So there you have it! So simple to start building up your contribution to Soar’s Digital Atlas. Those who might find this useful to upload maps include:

• Community groups
• Hobbyists
• Building a cartographic/geospatial portfolio
• Education/research
• Contributing to world events (some of the biggest news agencies already use this service i.e. BBC)

You can find out more about the QGIS Soar plugin at the QGIS Open Day on August 23rd, 2023 at 2300 HR AEST or 1300 HR UTC. Check here for more information or to watch back after.

If you’re interested in exploring how a QGIS plugin can make your service easily accessible to the millions of daily QGIS users, contact us to discuss how we can help!

The gift economy of Open Source is community driven and filled by folks with ideas that just go for it!

We at North Road are blessed that we get to join these creatives on their journey in order to get their products to you. Recently, the first QGIS flagship sponsor, Felt, engaged us to further strengthen their support for the up to 600,000 daily QGIS users to integrate their workflows between QGIS and Felt.

The result is the “Add to Felt” QGIS Plugin, which makes it super-simple to publish your QGIS maps to the Felt platform.

To get started, install the Add to Felt Plugin from the QGIS Plugin manager.

If you don’t have a free Felt account, you’ll need to sign up for one online (or from the Add to Felt plugin itself once you have installed it).

Within QGIS, users can easily publish their maps and layers to Felt. You can either:

• Publish a single layer by right-clicking the layer and selecting “Share Layer to Felt” from the Export sub-menu
• Publish your whole QGIS project/map by selecting the Project Menu, Export, “Add to Felt” action

Whilst Felt is loading up your map, you can continue working and it will let you know once your map is ready to open on Felt and share with others.

We are happy to let you know that the collaboration does not stop there! As with our SLYR tool, there is ongoing development as the requirements of the community and technology grow.  So install the Add to Felt Plugin via the QGIS Plugin manager, and let us know where you want it to go via the Add to Felt GitHub page.

Read more about it here:

• Felt’s Blog about the QGIS Plugin
• Installation Guide
• Getting Started for QGIS Users

• Peter Kimberley, Gradata Systems Pty Ltd, Canberra, Australia Vietnam War Missing in Action (MIA) Support
• HIdenori Watanave, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, Digital Archives of War and Disasters
• Ethan Berg, Agora World, Philadelphia, PA, USA, GeoForAll: Simplifying 3D Geospatial Metaverse Creation

So there we go! Working together collaboratively with Lutra Consulting on another great addition to QGIS 3D Functionality thanks to Cesium Ecosystem Grants. Stay tuned on our social channels to find out when it will be released in QGIS.

Annotation and Graphic Layer Improvements

Text Annotations along Curves

For those working with curved annotations, we’ve got you covered! SLYR now supports the conversion of text annotations along curves in QGIS. With this enhancement, you’ll get accurate conversion of any curved text and text-along-line annotations from MXD and APRX documents. This has been a long-requested feature which we can now introduce thanks to enhancements coming in QGIS 3.32.

ArcGIS Pro Graphics Layer Support

SLYR now supports the conversion of ArcGIS Pro graphics layers, converting all graphic elements to their QGIS “Annotation Layer” equivalents. If you’ve spent hours carefully designing cartographic markup on your maps, you can be sure that SLYR will allow you to re-use this work within QGIS!

Enhanced Page Layout Support

Improved QGIS to ArcGIS Pro Conversions

New tools

The latest SLYR release introduces some brand new tools for automating your conversion workflows:

All these exciting additions to SLYR are available today to SLYR license holders. If you’re after one-click, accurate conversion of projects from ESRI to QGIS, contact us to discuss your licensing needs.

As described on our SLYR page, we also provide some of the conversion tools for free use via the SLYR “Community Edition”. We’re proud to announce that we’ve just hit the next milestone in the Community Edition funding, and will now be releasing all of SLYR’s support for raster LYR files to the community edition! This complements the existing support for vector LYR files and ESRI style files available in the community edition. For more details on the differences between the licensed and community editions, see our product comparison.

The QGIS 3.28 release is an extremely exciting release for all users who work in mixed software workplaces, or who need to work alongside users of ESRI software. In this post we’ll be giving an overview of all the new tools and features introduced in 3.28 which together result in a dramatic improvement in the workflows and capabilities in working with ESRI based formats and services. Read on for the full details…!

Before we begin, we’d like to credit the following organisations for helping fund these developments in QGIS 3.28:

• Naturstyrelsen, Denmark
• Provincie Gelderland, Netherlands
• Uppsala Universitet, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History
• Gemeente Amsterdam
• Provincie Zuid-Holland, Netherlands

FileGeodatabase (GDB) related improvements

The headline item here is that QGIS 3.28 introduces support for editing, managing and creating ESRI FileGeodatabases out of the box! While older QGIS releases offered some limited support for editing FileGeodatabase layers, this required the manual installation of a closed source ESRI SDK driver… which unfortunately resulted in other regressions in working with FileGeodatabases (such as poor layer loading speed and random crashes). Now, thanks to an incredible reverse engineering effort by the GDAL team, the open-source driver for FileGeodatabases offers full support for editing these datasets! This means all QGIS users have out-of-the-box access to a fully functional, high-performance read AND write GDB driver, no further action or trade-offs required.

Operations supported by the GDAL open source driver include:

• Editing existing features, with full support for editing attributes and curved, 3D and measure-value geometries
• Creating new features
• Deleting features
• Creating, adding and modifying attributes in an existing layer
• Full support for reading and updating spatial indexes
• Creating new indexes on attributes
• “Repacking” layers, to reduce their size and improve performance
• Creating new layers in an existing FileGeodatabase
• Removing layers from FileGeodatabases
• Creating completely new, empty FileGeodatabases
• Creating and managing field domains

On the QGIS side, the improvements to the GDAL driver meant that we could easily expose feature editing support for FileGeodatabase layers for all QGIS users. While this is a huge step forward, especially for users in mixed software workplaces, we weren’t happy to rest there when we  had the opportunity to further improve GDB support within QGIS!

So in QGIS 3.28 we also introduced the following new functionality when working with FileGeodatabases:

FileGeodatabase management tools

QGIS 3.28 introduces a whole range of GUI based tools for managing FileGeodatabases. To create a brand new FileGeodatabase, you can now right click on a directory from the QGIS Browser panel and select New – ESRI FileGeodatabase:

After creating your new database, a right click on its entry will show a bunch of available options for managing the database. These include options for creating new tables, running arbitrary SQL commands, and database-level operations such as compacting the database:

You’re also able to directly import existing data into a FileGeodatabase by simply dragging and dropping layers onto the database!

Expanding out the GDB item will show a list of layers present in the database, and present options for managing the fields in those layers. Alongside field creation, you can also remove and rename existing fields.

Field domain handling

QGIS 3.28 also introduces a range of GUI tools for working with field domains inside FileGeodatabases. (GeoPackage users also share in the love here — these same tools are all available for working with field domains inside this standard format too!) Just right click on an existing FileGeodatabase (or GeoPackage) and select the “New Field Domain” option. Depending on the database format, you’ll be presented with a list of matching field domain types:

Once again, you’ll be guided through a user-friendly dialog allowing you to create your desired field domain!

After field domains have been created, they can be assigned to fields in the database by right-clicking on the field name and selecting “Set Field Domain”:

Field domains can also be viewed and managed by expanding out the “Field domains” option for each database.

Relationship discovery

Another exciting addition in QGIS 3.28 (and the underlying GDAL 3.6 release) is support for discovering database relationships in FileGeodatabases! (Once again, GeoPackage users also benefit from this, as we’ve implemented full support for GeoPackage relationships via the “Related Tables Extension“).

Expanding out a database containing any relationships will show a list of all discovered relationships:

(You can view the full description and details for any of these relationships by opening the QGIS Browser “Properties” panel).

Whenever QGIS 3.28 discovers relationships in the database, these related tables will automatically be added to your project whenever any of the layers which participate in the relationship are opened. This means that users get the full experience as designed for these databases without any manual configuration, and the relationships will “just work”!

Dataset Grouping

Lastly, we’ve improved the way layers from FileGeodatabases are shown in QGIS, so that layers are now grouped according to their original dataset groupings from the database structure:

Edit ArcGIS Online / Feature Service layers

While QGIS has had read-only support for viewing and working with the data in ArcGIS Online (AGOL) vector layers and ArcGIS Server “feature service” layers for many years, we’ve added support for editing these layers in QGIS 3.28. This allows you to take advantage of all of QGIS’ easy to use, powerful editing tools and directly edit the content in these layers from within your QGIS projects! You can freely create new features, delete features, and modify the shape and attributes of existing features (assuming that your user account on the ArcGIS service has these edit permissions granted, of course). This is an exciting addition for anyone who has to work often with content in ArcGIS services, and would prefer to directly manipulate these layers from within QGIS instead of the limited editing tools available on the AGOL/Portal platforms themselves.

This new functionality will be available immediately to users upon upgrading to QGIS 3.28 — any users who have been granted edit capabilities for the layers will see that the QGIS edit tools are all enabled and ready for use without any further configuration on the QGIS client side.

Filtering Feature Service layers

We’ve also had the opportunity to introduce filter/query support for Feature Service layers in QGIS 3.28. This is a huge performance improvement for users who need to work with a subset of a features from a large Feature Service layer. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the Feature Service protocol, these layers can often be slow to load and navigate on a client side. By setting a SQL filter to limit the features retrieved from the service the performance can be dramatically increased, as only matching features will ever be requested from the backend server. You can use any SQL query which conforms to the subset of SQL understood by ArcGIS servers (see the Feature Service documentation for examples of supported SQL queries).

What’s next?

While QGIS 3.28 is an extremely exciting release for any users who need to work alongside ESRI software, we aren’t content to rest here! The exciting news is that in QGIS 3.30 we’ll be introducing a GUI driven approach allowing users to create new relationships in their FileGeodatabase (and GeoPackage!) databases.

At North Road we’re always continuing to improve the cross-vendor experience for both ESRI and open-source users through our continued work on the QGIS desktop application and our SLYR conversion suite. If you’d like to chat to us about how we can help your workplace transition from a fully ESRI stack to a mixed or fully open-source stack, just contact us to discuss your needs.