# Time Manager - User guide

You can view this guide in your browser. It's located inside the plugin directory.

The aim of Time Manager plugin for QGIS is to provide comfortable browsing through temporal geodata. A dock widget provides a time slider and a configuration dialog for your layers to manage.

## The Time Manager dock

The dock was designed to attach to the bottom of the QGIS main window. It offers the following tools:

- ... On/Off switch, allows you to turn Time Manager's functionality on/off with the click of only one button
- [Settings] ... opens the Settings dialog where you can manage your spatio-temporal layers
- [Export Video] ... exports an image series based on current settings (This button is only enabled if there are layers registered in Time Manager "Settings")
- Time frame start: [2000-01-01 00:00:00] ... shows the start time of the currently active frame. Allows you to precisely specify your desired analysis time.
- Time frame size: [x]
  ... allow you to choose the size of the time frame
- ... go to the previous time frame
- ... go to the next time frame
- Slider ... shows the position of current frame relative to the whole dataset and allows you to seamlessly scroll through the dataset
- ... start an automatic animation based on your current settings

## The "Settings" dialog

The dialog has two areas: a layer list and animation options.

### The layer list

This list contains all layers managed by Time Manager. To add a layer press [Add Layer]. Similarly, if you want to remove a layer from the list, select it and press [Remove Layer].

#### The "Add Layer" dialog

Here, you are asked to select the layer that should be added and specify the columns containing start and (optionally) end time.

The offset option allows you to further time the appearance of features. If you specify an offset of -1, the features will appear one second later than they would by default.

### Animation options

Currently you'll find the following options:

- Show frame for milliseconds ... allows you to adjust for how long a frame will be visible during the animation
- [x] play animation backwards ... if checked, the animation will run in reverse direction
- [x] display frame start time on map ... if checked, displays the start time of the visible frame in the lower right corner of the map