At the end of 2019, we organised the first QField user day in Bern. Around 40 participants from Switzerland and neighbouring countries joined the packed event with use case presentations by various power users of QField.
Fantastic use-case presentations
After a brief introduction by Matthias, Samuel Wechsler from the Swiss Ornithological Institute showed how they make their teams fly with QField to be more effective in protecting the Swiss bird fauna and its habitat. Next on the podium was one of the earliest QField pioneers, Daniel Gnerre from the city of Vevey telling the audience how the city thoroughly uses QField to collect and update data on just about anything and how they integrated QField in their geospatial infrastructure.
After a short break, Philipp Eigenmann showed us how he uses QField to manage the forest he and his team are responsible for. Finally, Samuel Oester and Till Weber from Oester Messtechnik presented Gasbusters – Chasing gas with QField explaining how they used QField in over 200 soil gas leaks campaigns measuring over 39’000 points to be then visualised on maps and with Grafana.
Forest management in northern Switzerland with QField
The city of Vevey is a precursor in pushing QField
Oester Messtechnik presenting their workflow
The Swiss Ornithological Institute is leveraging QField in multiple projects to protect habitats and fauna
A user day wouldn’t be a user day if there was no space for discussion. After the fantastic presentations, we launched an open discussion on the future of QField and how to sustainably maintain its growth rate and quality thanks to [financially] committed users. The discussion showed us a lot of willingness and commitment to help QField keep its incredible innovation level and its market leader position as reference GIS fieldwork app. This obviously gave us a lot of ideas and motivation and made us enjoy the closing beers even more
We would like to extend again a warm thank you to all the speakers and participants. We’re definitely looking forward to the next QField user day!
What’s next?
On 11.03.2020, just before the QGIS hackfest in Den Bosch (NL), we’ll lead a full-day workshop in the awesome GeoFort. Don’t worry, the workshop will be in English.
QField is growing steadily, plenty of new features (including native cloud synchronisation) are planned with the next releases of QField. We’d like to thank again all organisations, companies and individuals that actively use QField and that invest in making QField even better.
If you feel QField misses something you need or would like to support the project, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.
This summer we went on tour with what turned out to be an extremely popular event: QGIS on the Road
Telling the most remarkable story of Maya the beekeeper building her honey business and fighting against seemingly hopeless challenges with the help of QGIS functionality you probably never heard of.
The Last Bee
After expanding into the mountains and showing us how she uses spatial bookmarks and live layers to manage her hives without leaving home, Maya also started a new business: with the help of the QGIS’ print layout manager, QGIS server and the Lizmap Web Client, Maya got her infrastructure ready for tourism.
Terrible news, a killer bee swarm escaped from a laboratory in northern Italy. Maya is desperate, if the killer bee reach her hives, it’s all gone. Maybe the weather could help Maya so she modelling the speed of travel of the killer bees and animates her analysis to see if her bees are likely to survive…
And Action!
We have taken care to create subtitles for all the videos so you can comfortably read Maya’s story in your favourite language. To enable the subtitles, just click on the CC button on the player.
We hope you enjoyed enjoyed our QGIS on the Road series and that you could learn some new tricks. Obviously this is only a fraction of the possibilities offered by the QGIS/QField Ecosystem which we know inside-out.
At OPENGIS.ch we can help you set up your spatial data infrastructure based on seamlessly integrated desktop, web and mobile components. We support your team in planning, developing, deploying and running your infrastructure. Thanks to several senior geodata infrastructure experts, QGIS core developers and the makers of QField, OPENGIS.ch has all it takes to make your project a success. OPENGIS.ch is known for its commitment to high-quality products and its continuous efforts to improve the open source ecosystem.
During the 2020 Swiss QGIS Users Group annual meeting, a proposal to improve the plugin manager was accepted to improve QGIS’ plugin manager. Starting with version 3.14, it will be possible to choose whether to install the stable or the experimental version of individual plugins.
This feature will greatly improve the workflow between developers and users of a plugin. Users will be able to easily switch between the stable version used in production, and the experimental version to test out new features.
Until now, it was necessary either to configure a dedicated extensions repository or to have users manually install development version from a zip file.
You can test out this new feature before 3.14 is out by installing a recent nightly build of QGIS and making sure you have enabled the “show experimental versions” in the plugin manager.
What a year’s start! After a very packed December publishing all the QGIS on the road videos and quietly releasing QField 1.3 – Ben Nevis we could have gone and relaxed over the holidays. But since we love QField so much we immediately started working on the next iteration. Now, after an intensive testing period, we are proud to announce the release of QField 1.4 – Olavtoppen.
Olavtoppen!? yes, the highest point of Bouvet Island, the remotest island on Earth. And sure enough, QField would follow you there!
Before digging into all the new goodness that you will find in QField 1.4, let’s get a big “Thanks” out to everybody who supported our crowdfunding campaign for improved camera support and all our customers that agreed to open source the work we did for them.
If you like QField, want a new feature or would like to support the project, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.
Usability enhancements
In QField 1.2 we started to improve on the usability of the user interface. We are constantly working on this with a usability expert to get the user interface to be even more appealing and user-friendly.
Besides lots of clean-up and polishing, QField received two major improvements, a portrait mode and a new welcome screen with recent projects.
Welcome screen with recent projects
QField is all about efficiency. While favourites folders in the file selector already give a great productivity boost, very often we work with the same 3-4 projects. This is why we redesigned the welcome screen to list the last five project used. And if you look carefully you might get a hint of what will be coming soon…
Portrait mode
QField now flawlessly works in portrait mode. We heard you say you needed a comfortable way to work in portrait mode, especially on smartphones. QField forms and button placements are now optimized to be easy to use with your thumbs.
Optimised forms
Buttons align at the bottom
Roomy legend
New features
We keep on listening to your feedback and prioritize new features based on it. We did implement some minor features like allowing hiding legend nodes and printing to PDF using the current extent. But this time’s superstars are three highly expected features: Splitting of geometries, compass integration and, yes you guessed right, native camera and gallery app support!
Split Features
A new editing tool is available that allows for splitting existing features. This adds an even more powerful operation to an already impressive geometry editing tools set.
Compass integration
A long-awaited feature! QField now shows you on-screen in which direction you are looking, walking, driving, flying or warping direction. This makes it much easier and more pleasant to navigate in the field.
Native Camera and Gallery
It is now possible to use your favourite camera app so that you have more control over how pictures are taken. It is also possible to select pictures which are already on your device by using the new gallery selector.
Pro Tip: You can use any camera app. For example, you can use the open camera app to create geotagged photos if your preinstalled system camera doesn’t save positioning information in EXIF data.
Pro Tip 2: You can use an image annotation app to add notes, sketches, drawings and so on to your images and then choose them from QField via the add from gallery button.
Antenna Height Correction
For high precision measurements, it’s possible to compensate your altitude by a fixed antenna height. This will then automatically adjust all the digitised altitude values.
JPEG 2000
Support for JPEG 2000 raster datasets was added. This lossy format offers a compression rate at par with proprietary formats like ECW or Mr SID.
Pro Tip: save your base maps in JPEG 2000 to save storage.
New Languages
Thanks to the hard work of our community, QField is now also available in Turkish and Japanese.
New packages
You say: wow that’s a lot! We say: there is more We have upgraded our whole building infrastructure so that you can comfortably get even more QField goodness without having to uninstall your production ready QField.
Automated master builds
After each pull request is merged into our master code, a new package is created and automatically published on the playstore in a dedicated app called QField for QGIS – Unstable (Early Access). Installing this app will allow you to always have the latest build of QField for testing and giving feedback. On your device, this app is completely separated from the production-ready QField and has a distinctive black icon so that you do not confuse it.
Pull request builds
QField is an extremely active project, and as you see we develop multiple functionalities and fixes at the same time. If you’re particularly interested in one of this, our continuous integration fairy builds and publishes new packages automatically at each commit directly to the pull request you are interested in. To see what we are currently working on, have a look at the pull request overview page.
Experimental Windows builds
Last but definitely not least, we’ve set up an Azure CI infrastructure to build QField for windows. For now, we still consider this experimental but we already had some very successful testing. If you are interested in testing out QField for windows you can get it here, remember it is experimental so don’t use it in production yet and give us as much feedback as possible
What’s next?
As you can imagine we’ve had a very busy start of 2020, but even more is to come soon with the next releases of QField. We’d like to thank again all companies and individuals that actively use QField and that invest in making QField even better. If you feel QField misses something you need or would like to support the project, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.
This summer we went on tour with what turned out to be an extremely popular event: QGIS on the Road
Telling the most remarkable story of Maya the beekeeper building her honey business and fighting against seemingly hopeless challenges with the help of QGIS functionality you probably never heard of.
The Rise of the Hives
During last episode, Maya demonstrated the basics of the creation of a project: loading WMS layers from the Swiss Geoportal, creating simple layers, automatic setup of widgets, importing and merging layers and even playing with Interlis data.
After analysing the area, Maya now has more hives in the forest. She will locate them using a GPS and import the data through a GPX file. She will then use her advanced knowledge of QGIS symbology capabilities to produce beautiful and meaningful maps.
And Action!
We have taken care to create subtitles for all the videos so you can comfortably read Maya’s story in your favorite language. To enable the subtitles, just click on the CC button on the player.
Features shown in this episode
Creating a processing model to import data from a GPX file
Improving labeling
Using a geometry generator in the symbology
Importing styles
Using cluster symbols
Coming Tuesday on QGIS on the Road: Attack of the Destructor
After showing how to process data and load styles, Maya prepares for the next episode. She will have some severe problems and to be able to come up with an emergency plan blindfolded. She will need to collect data on the field using QField and analyze this data in the attribute table before moving on to creating stunning effects by animating the map canvas. So better stay tuned
This summer we went on tour with what turned out to be an extremely popular event: QGIS on the Road
Telling the most remarkable story of Maya the beekeeper building her honey business and fighting against seemingly hopeless challenges with the help of QGIS functionality you probably never heard of.
Attack of the Destructor
In the last episode, Maya started to populate many beehives around her home. She has visualized and labeled them to have concise information and an easily understandable map representation of her honey production.
After Maya realizes that many of her beehives have been infected by severe diseases she needs to act quickly to get an overview of the situation. She grabs some friends and tablets and launches QField to map the situation. After assessing the results with advanced configuration of the attribute table she is ready to choose the right measures and do a precise intervention. And of course, this precise intervention is accompanied with a visualization that is on fire.
And Action!
We have taken care to create subtitles for all the videos so you can comfortably read Maya’s story in your favourite language. To enable the subtitles, just click on the CC button on the player.
Features shown in this episode
Configuration of attribute form and widgets
Using QField to collect data in the field (including snapping)
Configuring the attribute table with colors and icons
Live layers to show animated maps
Coming Thursday on QGIS on the Road: A New Hope
After emergency response with mobile data collection, attribute table representation optimizations and live layers, Maya will go back to growing her business in the next episode. She will create links between information on different layers by using relations, she will show how to use animated charts on feature forms using the QML widget and she will be using the advanced digitizing tools to create precise geometries based on angles and distances to create an exact map based on a paper sketch. So better stay tuned
Serving as a pragmatic community conciliator – collecting thoughts from people with differing opinions and trying to find the high road through difficult issues – I want to focus my and the community’s energies on our core product, QGIS.
Marco Bernasocchi · QGIS.org Chair
OPENGIS.ch has always been dedicated to sustaining QGIS’ technological and economical well-being, supporting it with endless hours of internally funded QA, infrastructure works and developments.
Today we are very proud to announce that our commitment has grown even more as one of our founders and CEO Marco Bernasocchi was elected Chair of the QGIS.org association.
With over 15 years of involvement with QGIS (he started working with QGIS 0.6) and two years serving as vice-chair, Marco will serve for the next two years as Chairperson of the QGIS.org association.
Understanding the importance of the role trusted him, Marco would like to thank the QGIS community for the trust and appreciation. Marco is looking forward to intensifying work with the PSC and the fantastic QGIS community to push QGIS even further.
We wish Marco and the rest of the elected PSC two very successful years full of QGIS awesomeness.
I want to help QGIS and it’s community thrive under the value proposition of:
Making the most amazing opensource GIS that provides users with value and that meets their needs by providing great functionality and usability, being cost-effective whilst being actively supported by a vibrant and knowledgeable community.
Sharing our work under an open-source license is part of the approach by which we achieve that value proposition as it allows broad collaboration with our developers and users community.
I see FOSS as a very socially responsible way to develop software, but even more, I see the immense technological advantage that writing open-source code brings. This is why I want our focus to be on allowing both pragmatic and ideological views to respectfully coexist and enrich each other.
One of my main motivations to be part of the PSC and to make myself available as project Chair is to help QGIS keep this incredible growth rate by being even more attractive to new community members, sponsors and large/corporate users. To achieve this, the key is maintaining the right balance between sustainable processes (that guarantee the great quality QGIS has been known for) and an interesting and motivating grassroots project to ensure that QGIS remains an attractive project for volunteers to contribute to and help QGIS and its community to grow to become even more the reference [Open Source] GIS project.
This summer we went on tour with what turned out to be an extremely popular event: QGIS on the Road
Telling the most remarkable story of Maya the beekeeper building her honey business and fighting against seemingly hopeless challenges with the help of QGIS functionality you probably never heard of.
A new hope
In the last episode, Maya minimized the damage the destructor made to her bees, using complex forms and widgets, the advanced functionalities of the attribute table, live layers and even QField for mobile data collection.
Maya is coming back with a lot of new ideas, demanding more QGIS power. Since she has received plenty of great feedback on honey from hives located at certain spots, she wants to have full overview over the whole area now. First, she uses relations to link information on different layers, then she creates animated charts on feature forms with the QML widget and – to cover the entire area – she uses the advanced digitizingtool to create precise geometries using angles and distances based on a paper sketch.
And Action!
We have taken care to create subtitles for all the videos so you can comfortably read Maya’s story in your favourite language. To enable the subtitles, just click on the CC button on the player.
Features shown in this episode
Setting up relations and use them in the forms
Visualize the data using animated charts created in QML
Create precise geometries with the advanced digitizing tool
Coming Tuesday on QGIS on the Road: The Web Strikes Back
Once Maya has full control over her neighbourhood, she will expand up into the mountains in the next episode. She will show us how she uses spatial bookmarks and live layers to manage her hives without leaving home. Maya also starts a new business: With the help of the QGIS’ print composer and the Lizmap Web Client, she gets her infrastructure ready for tourism. So stay tuned
This summer we went on tour with what turned out to be an extremely popular event: QGIS on the Road
Telling the most remarkable story of Maya the beekeeper building her honey business and fighting against seemingly hopeless challenges with the help of QGIS functionality you probably never heard of.
The Web Strikes Back
In the last episode, Maya has got full control over her neighbourhood and she has now a complete overview of her bees habits.
Maya expands up into the mountains. She will show us how she uses spatial bookmarks and live layers to manage her hives without leaving home. Maya also starts a new business: with the help of the QGIS’ print layout manager, QGIS server and the Lizmap Web Client, she gets her infrastructure ready for tourism.
And Action!
We have taken care to create subtitles for all the videos so you can comfortably read Maya’s story in your favourite language. To enable the subtitles, just click on the CC button on the player.
Features shown in this episode
Creation and use of spatial bookmarks
Use of live layers
Print layouts
Publish a project online with Lizmap Web Client
Coming Thursday on QGIS on the Road: The Last Bee
After reaching the peak of success, in the next episode, Maya will use raster analysis and the time manager plugin to try to avert a serious threat looming over her bees. Will she succeed? Stay tuned to find out
We would like to use WMS offline on QField. For that, we need to figure out what is the best way to get a raster from a WMS and which format is the most efficient (size and performance).
In this post we’ll show you is how to generate the ideal raster file from a WMS and the results of our efficiency tests for the the different raster formats.
WMS to GPKG
The simple way
If there is no limitation on the WMS or you need only a small region, here is the easiest process.
If the command takes too much time, it means that it is trying to download too much data and could be caused by downloading higher resolution data than required. The command might even completely fail if it contains a request for bigger data blocks thant the server allows.
Here is the process to get larger datasets in a simple way. Let’s use a real example:
Use gdal_translate "WMS:https://www.gebco.net/data_and_products/gebco_web_services/web_map_service/mapserv?request=getmap&service=wms&crs=EPSG:4326&format=image/jpeg&layers=gebco_latest&version=1.1.0" test.xml -of WMS
Open the test.xml file for editing, here you’ll find the parameters of the WMS. We change the “SizeX” to 3600 and “SizeY” to 1800. By changing these parameters we lower the resolution. It is important to keep proportionality.
Another thing we need to change are “BlockSizeX” and “BlockSizeY” that define the size of the tiles. We change both to 2048.
Finally, use gdal_translate -of GPKG test.xml test.gpkg -co TILE_FORMAT=JPEG
To make a Geopackage pyramid use gdaladdo GPKG:test.gpkg:gebco_latest. It will replace the Geopackage, if you want to keep the original one, you need to copy it first.
Now you have a raster Geopackage that you can use in QField.
Testing raster formats
Preparing the files
As first step we exported our test orthophoto WMS to a plain GeoTIFF using QGIS’ default behaviour.
Default parameters used to create the initial tiff
We have tested many formats, here is a table with the results of the size and rendering speed in QGIS and QField. To analyze the speed we used qgis_bench.exe -i 10 -p "C:\test\test.qgs" >> "C:\test\test.log. Qgis_bench is a tool that renders a QGIS project a number of times to get performance measurements. The parameter -i is to define the iterations and -p is the project used which contains only the generated raster.
Format
Extent [m]
File size [GB]
Total_avg
Total_maxdev
Total_min
Total_stdev
gpkg JPEG
52’880/29’230
0.4
250.242
255.781
5.539
244.984
gpkg PNG
52’880/29’230
2.9
412.002
490.328
152.142
259.859
gpkg PNG_JPEG
52’880/29’230
0.4
250.125
256.875
6.750
245.172
gpkg PNG8
52’880/29’230
1.4
283.875
296.406
12.625
271.250
gpkg WEBP
52’880/29’230
0.3
330.238
348.109
73.534
256.703
gpkg pyramid_JPEG
52’880/29’230
0.5
1.009
3.406
2.397
0.688
gpkg pyramid_PNG
52’880/29’230
3.0
1.208
3.281
2.073
0.688
gpkg pyramid_PNG_JPEG
52’880/29’230
0.6
1.491
4.344
2.853
1.016
gpkg pyramid_PNG8
52’880/29’230
1.6
1.508
4.375
2.867
0.969
gpkg pyramid_WEBP
52’880/29’230
0.4
1.333
4.906
3.573
0.766
JPEG2000
52’880/29’230
1.1
13.888
136.109
122.222
0.219
COG DEFLATE
52’880/29’230
3.6
264.427
273.094
25.411
239.016
COG_JPEG
52’880/29’230
1.0
14.778
131.172
116.394
1.734
tif
52’880/29’230
6.4
2.367
6.734
4.367
1.672
MBT
52’880/29’230
4.4
0.469
4.641
4.171
0
Comparison of file size and rendering speed of different raster formats. “Total” columns are rendering times in [s]. Lower file size is more storage friendly, lower Total_avg is more performant.
Analysis
File size
The Geopackage WEBP (with and without pyramid) has the best result for file size, but it is not yetsupported by QField (from 1.6) and is only slightly smaller than the JPEG variant.
Plain GeoTiff, MBTiles, Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG – DEFLATE mode) and Geopackages with PNG generate by far the largest file sizes (up to 20x larger) and are thus not recommended.
Rendering speed
MBTiles are on average double as fast as JPEG Geopackages with pyramids which in turn are more than double as fast as GeoTIFF and 15x faster than COG. Geopackages without pyramids are 200 to 400 times slower.
Conclusion
Even though MBTiles render faster than the Geopackage pyramid JPEG, they come with an almost 10x bigger storage requirement which makes us say that the best offline raster format supported by QField is Geopackage pyramid JPEG or if you need transparency and slightly smaller files Geopackage pyramid WebP.
If you need transparency before QField 1.6, the best results are achieved with Geopackage pyramid PNG_JPEG.
