QGIS Cloud: Creating Simple Online Maps

so as I mentioned our topic today is getting started with QGIS cloud this is going to be a very introductory webinar sort of assuming that you probably know how to use QGIS at least a little bit but nothing much beyond that and really starting from the beginning before I get into it too much I do want to point out the V CGI YouTube page where you will find this webinar once it's recorded but also where you will be able to find other QGIS related webinars that we've done in the past so if you're interested but you actually don't know all that much about using QGIS you can check out what we have posted here there are other topics but if you scroll through this you will see some QGIS topics and our YouTube page is called VT geospatial you can also get to it from the front page of our regular website which is V CGI dot Vermont gov or if you just search on V CGI let's see one other thing I want to mention so QGIS is the software that we're going to be using to actually make our map which then will export to QGIS cloud so I just want to mention QGIS briefly QGIS org free open source GIS software as you can see here just have to go to the website and download the software it's pretty straightforward there is also a fair amount of what they call documentation which is access to user guide training manual and online training tutorials that goes through tutorials that are actually very helpful you can also just find a lot of tutorials and other sorts of information on the web if you just do some searches and my final mention is to make sure that people who are interested in QGIS know that the Foss 4G conference is going to be taking place in Boston in 2017 Fah stands for free and open source software 4G refers to for geography or geospatial I guess and so this conference folk is on open source GIS software and it's going to be taking place in Boston 2017 so I just wanted to mention that okay so QGIS cloud not surprisingly has a website it's based in the cloud and it's actually QGIS cloud comm because you have some options when using QGIS cloud so the first thing to point out is that there is obviously a free version which is to be honest the main reason that I'm doing a training on it or doing this webinar because it is a free option it's nice to have a free way to publish online maps to create online mapping applications it also has a pro version and I just looked up the conversion here and it says 65 euro per month which is about $70 per month so if you find that this is useful enough that it's work worth purchasing the pro version it's going to have a lot more functionality that I honestly don't know much about because I am NOT going to be taking advantage of that so if it's of interest you look into it otherwise we're just going to talk about the free version today the free plan QGIS cloud also has a section called documentation which in this case is just one simple quick start guide which is perfectly useful it actually covers exactly what we're going to do right now so I'll just point out what it says since it's what I was going to go over anyway you do have to have QGIS on your the desktop version of QGIS in order to use or take advantage of QGIS cloud we will be actually creating our map in QGIS the desktop version so that's the first thing you'll want to do is install QGIS you also do have to have a QGIS account before you try to publish your map to QGIS cloud so at this website will briefly look at how you how you create that account it's very simple once you have your account you've downloaded your you have your QGIS software and you start using it you're going to install the QGIS plug-in in your QGIS software in order to install or basically turn on plug-in some of which download with the software some of which it will fetch for you when you say you want to install it you're going to click on the plug-in dialog up it's a plug-in menu up in the top will show you that in a minute you'll go through the list you'll see QGIS cloud you'll just put a little X in the box next to it and click install and it'll show up as you can see it shows up as kind of a little panel over here on the left of your QGIS panels when you're ready to do something with your map well in this case they're doing it a slightly different order than I would but they basically say you have to login to QGIS cloud from that plug-in so once we're in QGIS we're going to login to that you're going to create a map and then you're going to go through a few steps to install or sorry to publish that map to QGIS cloud ok so there's you know now that there's a little review of this back on the QGIS cloud page as well quick quick start so if you don't already have an account you would click on sign up all you have to provide is a username your email your password twice once you do this and click sign up you'll have to do a quick confirmation process where you go to your email you'll I think click on a link that they send you and at that point you'll have a live account since I already have an account I'm going to go ahead and sign in now but you'll see that I have an empty account because I cleaned out what was in here before so this is what it looks like when you very first set it up click on maps and you can see I have no Maps so let's go ahead and open up QGIS and make a map I do have a slightly older version of QGIS installed I was having some trouble with a newer version oops and so I I went ahead and went back to an older version I think I need to get back in here and install the newer version but nothing major it's different in this version than any newer version you might be using all right so here's QGIS anyone who's familiar familiar with GIS software even if you're not familiar with QGIS you'll see that it's all very similar layout there's a bunch of tools and tabs and menus there are there's the table of contents or the layer list and there's the map view so the first thing okay I forgot I was going to undo this so let's pretend for a second that I don't have cloud the cloud plug-in already in place so what you would do is click on that plugins menu and eventually you'll get to this list of plugins as you can see there's a lot of default plugins available here some of which are already turned on and some of which are not depending on whether you've turned them on or whether they were turned on by default okay so here's QGIS cloud so if if we didn't already have this turned on you would simply click here to put a plus sign there and then click install it would take just a second and it would appear since we already have it installed even though it's not visible right now all we have to do is click here to get it to show up all right so now we are ready to make a map I'm to make a very simple map and share a few tips that I've figured out in trying to work on this the most important tip is that the more you use map services in creating your map the better off you're going to be that's not a limitation it's just something that's going to make things go quicker and in some cases may be a little bit easier so let me just go ahead and add in a service Oh actually I'm sorry I forgot that one of the neat things about QGIS cloud is actually the fact that it offers you some services that are very easy to include your map because they're right here in the QGIS cloud plug-in interface if you click on the map tab and then click on add background layer you'll see what you'll see that you have a bunch of options here and each one of these actually has multiple options within it so there's OpenStreetMaps Google Maps Bing Maps MapQuest osm stamen which is actually what I'm going to use I'm going to use the water color so these are basically a variety of different base maps that you can choose from and this is in fact just a map service that's coming in so that's I know right off that that's going to be easy to deal with I'm also going to add a VC GI web map service so I'm not going to go through the process of starting from scratch adding a service in the sense that I already have some here that I've used in the past if you're interested in learning how to do this check out one of the other webinars that's about adding data to a map so I just have to shoot because I these are listed here because I've used them before and these are the names that I gave them actually so you can see there's some misspellings so I'm choosing our base map this is the VC GI or sorry V GIS base map something that's created by V CGI and it's called the basement of actually because it has lots and lots of different data layers but I am NOT going to use the whole base map or all of these data layers I just want town boundaries so I'm just clicking on town boundaries I'm going to make sure that I've changed my image encoding to PNG make sure whenever you bring in a service that you're not using TIFF that will make it look very odd when it comes in the from what I read you can use JPEG or PNG but I actually find that PNG is more reliably more reliable in terms of how the service comes in so I'm going to go ahead and add that and close that you can see it's shown up here and there we go alright so it's not perfect but it is a town boundary layer that's easy to add if if I wanted to I could definitely use a local data layer that I have on my computer for the town boundaries I'm just choosing not to because it's one less layer that's going to have to get uploaded in this process if I use the service so I'm going to use the service even though it's got the annoying dotted boundaries that I can't change the symbology on okay so those are my two services that I want to bring in and then my final thing is a local vector data layer that I have right on my computer and it is simply the airports of Vermont so as you can see it's a shapefile and there it is bunch of dots so here's my second tip and this might only relate to people in Vermont or using Vermont data I'm not sure well actually I do know that other people have encountered this problem I'm not sure how widespread it is but when I first started trying to use QGIS cloud I found that in the next step where I try to upload local data into a little database that QGIS cloud creates for me then I would get an error message and the our message referred to the coordinate reference system the the ID that's used to indicate what coordinate reference system is being used and it basically was saying it either didn't recognize or it was an invalid code and so it couldn't do it and I was sort of confused by that knowing that our data is projected and it has a prj file that indicates the correct coordinate system there's something about our prj files or shape files I'm not sure exactly what that is not the the code or the format is not recognized by QGIS despite the fact that it has no problem bringing the data in to the QGIS desktop product or converting on-the-fly so I'm not really sure why there's a problem but as a workaround I determined that if I did what am I about to do which is simply taking the original shapefile saving as a different file format and in this case I figured geo JSON because it's an open source GIS format I sort of had a feeling that if I did this whatever the issue was would be resolved because QGIS doesn't actually have a problem with our data or our coordinate system so I figured it would probably convert it in whatever way it needed to so I'm just going to take my data and save it as a geo taste on the file and the other thing and I honestly don't know why this is but you need to go need to in the Gila we'll see if this works I did not actually set the CRS and the project so we'll see if this works actually just a quick sorry I'm usually very good about remembering to set my project CRS before I start okay try that again save as and I'm going to set the CRS to project CRS so rather than I'm not sure again why this makes a difference actually this may be why we're able to get around whatever it's interpreting about that particular shape file since i've indicated vermont state plane for the project it can take that information and indicate it however it works for QGIS alright and then the one nope that's it that's hereís okay takes a second okay and when it's done you can see it says it's done it shows up so my new Jo geo JSON file is shown up in my list of layers I can turn off my other layer and you can see that it's the Geo JSON file that's here so I can actually get rid of this one just going to remove it from the project okay so now I have a layer that I'm actually going to deal with the symbology make it an airport and I'd be a little bit bigger there's my map okay so there's my simple map that I've made once i oh i don't also can do is going to put some labels on there there we go alright so there's my simple map just shows the airport's airport locations a little airplane symbol and some labels my next step and as you can see this is part of what the process you need to do do your map finish your map in QGIS do your symbology do your labeling whatever you want to do your fussing around with the map now when it's done you're going to deal with the upload so as you can see the only data that I have to upload is the VT airport's file obviously if I had more local data in here in this project they would show up as multiple rows here but I only have the one so I'm going to go ahead and click upload data so this is the moment where if I didn't have my QGIS account already set up I would be stopped in my tracks but since I do I just have to log in and I could have done that log in as soon as I turned on the plug-in of course and this will just take a second and actually if you look down at the bottom of my screen if you can see that it says uploading to database it's sort of created this database with a goofy answer now it says replace layer VT airports so what it's doing right now is it's replacing my local data in this project that I'm working on it's replacing my local data with a web map service actually that it has just made out of that data because it has done that it immediately pops up this window to say save project because it's saying you know we've changed your project and now you either want to overwrite your previous project or you want to save this with a different name and of course I haven't even saved it yet you can see I've got some old ones on here I'm going to go ahead and take you just cloud okay so that's an important thing to understand just in case it matters to you your original project that had local data in it you normally would have saved that of course and once you go through this process of uploading your local data you've now created a project that has the local data replaced with a web map service that exists in QGIS cloud so that's the first step the second step is publish map so basically it's just two steps once you finish your map you go to your QGIS cloud plug-in you upload your data as you can see we're done so we don't have to do that anymore and then the second step is simply to publish your map takes a second and once it's done it says map successfully published and it gives you this is how you know this is a published map you have all of these links on the map page the web map the mobile map the public WMS so again we've actually create I have actually created a web map service of my airport data actually it's of my Airport yeah it's of my Airport data like it includes also the it includes the the town boundaries as well pretty sure we'll see in just a second map admin we can check out this is this will take you to the admin section of your account alright so let's just check out our web map it looks like we're in the ocean there ah we are in the ocean that's no good how interesting as usual when you do a live demonstration strange things happen that did not happen when you did your oh well that's odd well I'm going to show you the features of our web map that we just created and then perhaps we shall go back and try to figure out why it did that okay and somebody sent in a question I will get back to that just a second we may very well we do this so I can cover that again okay so the basic thing here is that it's a very simple web map it has zoomin zoom-out you can identify so click on just like in a GIS program click on the identify icon in order to turn it into an identify tool and then you either hover or click on your maps actually there we go so if you actually click on a feature you'll get the full attribute listing of attributes for that feature so something to think about I suppose is if you're going to create a map like this you might want to clean up your attribute table before you actually use it in a map that you're going to publish because obviously something like this is not terribly user-friendly works but you can see you can turn layers on and off one of the primary benefits other than zoom in and out and you can turn your background layer off which is also nice you have some measure tools not sure how accurate those are going to be right now given our location and and that includes distance and area you do a little double click you clicking single left click to create vertices or vertices in the line or the area and then double click to finish and actually I should point out the results for those measurements are down here at the bottom of the screen notice that it's also telling me the coordinates wherever I am on the map also down at the bottom of the screen here it's giving me the scale down at the bottom a little scale bar here to the left yeah so pretty basic there's some search capability with your identification if you have multiple layers on here you can choose top most hit or all layers which I assume is going to let me know I'm not sure how that's giving me all layers well not sure how that's offering me all layers that's right maybe it's because it's a yeah okay so I think those are the main the main characteristics of the actual very simple web map that we've produced okay I'm going to go back to my actually close this go back and figure out why I've turned out the way it did I think I am going to do this over one more time so somebody asked a question about the fact that when you very first try to upload your data it's going to say you have to create a database and I think because I've done it before I'm not getting I might not be getting exactly the same pop up that you would the first time you do it and so as a result I already have this little database here and it may just be that you have to say yes the very first time and it'll because all it's doing is creating a database in QGIS cloud in your account all right I just closed this all together start over okay all right so let's start with our background layer hope no actually I'm not doing that in my starting with my project properties it was already for that sorry all right so I've definitely set it to vermont state plane just to set it to something and I will add my background layer and add in my town boundaries okay so in here it's all lining up properly for the best I think I am just gonna start from scratch so we'll add the airport's in again the shape file and then we will save as our geo JSON file we will set that to project CRS and click OK and so there's our airports and my quick update and labels actually answer it okay so there's our map now we are ready to upload our data so this is the point at which someone had commented or asked about the fact that it says you have to create a database here let me just check something no this doesn't have a database so I guess if it is telling you you have to create a database I think it's going to give you the option just say ok and it's just going to create it it's not something that you have to actively do it's going to create it for you on your QGIS cloud account ok so there it is uploading now and now it's replacing my local layers with the service that's created and I'll just place that all right now we can publish let's see if this one looks a little more spatially correct alright that looks better there's Lake Champlain okay so I suspect that that has to do with some aspect of when I set my coordinate reference system so I'll stick with my normal advice which is set it whatever you set it to set it before you start your map and when excuse me when saving as with your local data saving as to something else if you need to do that make sure to set it to project CRS not layer CRS okay so there's our map again notice that there's a mobile version that's one of the nice things about this it creates a version that it's appropriate for mobile and and the other thing I wanted to demonstrate it's just what it means that it's created this WMS this means that if you your local organization or you individually have data that normally just sits on your computer or somewhere on your server if you're at work but you'd like to be able to share it with people or with co-workers or whatever rather than having to send copies of it via email or on DVDs or on drives you can actually just publish a web map service using QGIS cloud which is a pretty cool option for free there is a limit to how many of these you're allowed to do I'm sure didn't bother to look at that since I'm not doing high production on QGIS cloud but that's something you want to look at if if that could be a limitation so let's just go ahead and let's see how did I do this before I just open up a second instance of this No oh I know I'm just going to do a right click copy link location and then I'm going to open up a new map close this and I am going to use another web map imagery service so the other things I have in here is Oh best of color cash all right so this is an imagery service that we publish for ortho photography for Vermont now this is where it's most important not to leave this on the default that it goes through for some reason which is tiff go ahead and change that to PNG and I'm going to give it a name I go ahead and add that that alright guys just take a second oh and it looks like I forgot to them again I'm doing bad practices here okay so there is some color imagery and now I want to add in our brand new web map service so here a I'm actually going through the process of adding a new web map service you can see I just clicked on new that popped open this window I'll give it a name don't need user name and password now I have to connect to it there it is and so here's the thing to notice um because I actually had two things other than that background layer that I actually exactly why it distinguishes the background layer but obviously that's something that's being provided through QGIS cloud or QGIS or in a sense the ones that I had actively added to my map project were the airports which had been a local layer and the town boundaries and it has actually published both of those as part of my web map service so I can add the whole thing which would lump together the airports and the town boundaries or I can actually add them separately which in some ways is more useful because then they show up separately so I can add the airports and then I can add the town boundaries and there they are now if you're not that familiar with web map services a key thing to know is that when you add data this way it is pre symbolized and you can't edit that if it's a web map service you cannot edit the symbology the color line thickness all that so this is a way to conveniently provide data over the Internet it allows you to not have to save copy or update the data because if you as the WMS publisher if you need to update your data you go ahead and update your data and it will be magically and automatically updated by for all the users the order here for some reason there we go okay so I just want to point that out because that's also kind of a powerful thing to be able to do we just take a look at some of the questions to see if there are any other things there's one other thing I want to mention which unfortunately I have to mention it in the context of not successfully having figured it out yet but okay so somebody asks is there a way to project images and video associated with the map data by writing script and embedding it in the attribute table I do not know the answer to that question I'm afraid I would assume that if you have the one thing I assume would work is if you have URLs in your attribute data then obviously when you do a identify option or an identify action on your web map and see the full list of attributes listed on the right there you would have a live link pretty sure you would have a live link there but I do not know anything about customizing this beyond pretty much what I've shown you today oh actually that's not true there are two things we're going to talk about just second that are very limited and they're not that exciting but they are additional things and I believe one of them has to do with this second question our GIS cloud Maps QGIS cloud Maps forced to be public can you share the map among a group of users rather than making it public so let's look at that question if I go ahead and log into my QGIS account let me just see if I don't think I can do it from here well maybe I'm still logged in no all right so if I log into my account and remember I can actually get to what I'm about to show you right from my project if I was still in that project there was a link that took me right to the admin section of our account of my account so I'm only doing this because I had already closed that project all right so now I'm logged in you can see I'm logged in up here when I click on maps now we actually see my two maps that I created one of which is in the ocean somewhere and one of which is not and if we go into edit this actually means edit the settings not edit the map so you can see here's the name now an interesting thing I believe this is a function of this being the free version of QJ S Cloud not a lot of these things I actually can't change notice that I can change the name purportedly although I have to admit yesterday when I tried to change the name it didn't seem to take I may not have been patient enough might just take a little while for the change to register but you can edit this these words you can delete this and put in a different name but then a number of these settings I cannot change I get the big rid no language I can change identify mode I can change for some reason I'm not sure why that's an important setting but there it is you can see but these other things cannot change scales is an interesting one that when I tried this in the past this did work when I try to yesterday it didn't so I didn't bother to demonstrate it today but essentially what this does is allow you to set some pre-determined scales at which you would like your map to be viewed so rather than letting it be the whole world if your map is focused on your town you don't really want people using the viewer to look at the whole world you can set it to an appropriate scale for maybe the initial view of your town and then just two or three other scales that seemed appropriate to you so you can type those in here and again as I said when I tried this the other day it worked right charlie yesterday it didn't but it did set it so that when I initially went into the map it was at the initial scale and when I clicked the zoom in it only let me click into those predetermined scales and then so access for other US users is another setting that is not activated so I have a feeling that the answer to the question about the different levels of access whether you can just release this to people people that you would choose to allow to view it is going to be determined by which kind of plan you have so so there's my quick answer to the question about whether you can limit access or to or identify certain people to give access to let's just check whether it says that in the plans options there's more viewer customization you have more storage space yeah maps and WMS with restricted access so that would be one of the paid options okay so someone else how to question Li just remember oh the one other thing I wanted to point out before I answer last few questions is in our project when I go ahead and go back to that okay just taking a second to load in our project I did not create a a print composer a layout for my map so for anybody who's used QGIS before or if you used ArcGIS it's the same idea this is we're currently in the data view we're taking a look at just really focusing on the data itself and how its symbolized if we were wanting to create a layout of a map with a title and legend and all those other aspects of a map we would use the print composer and we would create a particular layout we would set a bunch of settings so this is setting the size and orientation of the page then we would start putting things on it like the map we would adjust how it all looks so now that I've got the map on there I'm going to change the properties for the map we would put a legend on we would do all sorts of great stuff by creating a print composer at least one in your project and having that exists as part of your project when you publish that project to QGIS cloud it actually enables the print option in QGIS cloud however there is a bizarre limitation in that print option which is the reason I didn't really focus on this I wasn't I figured if we had time I would let you know about this and obviously it the nice thing about that is that when you then go to print that map it includes the elements that you've put in your layout but it the limitation is that it limits it to a 1 to 50000 scale which is like for me wanting to do a map of the whole state of Vermont I've got this at a scale of about 1.8 million to 1 so 1 to 15,000 doesn't really make sense if I want people to be able to zoom out or print a map that's a different scale another issue is that it gives a warning about earrings just go ahead and do this show you alright let's go ahead and choose this and publish this so a question I just got is actually whether you can edit the map once it has been published or whether you need to republish it and I believe the answer is you need to republish it because you cannot publish the map within the QGIS cloud interface so I'm just going to go ahead and publish this again ok go ahead and save it all right let's see if that change registered okay good we're not back in the ocean so notice that print map has now been enabled but when I click on it you can see this limitation so it gives you a range of scales at which to print but the highest or rather the smallest scale is one to 50,000 which is a little bit odd I think if I had multiple layout layouts that I had created associated with that project they would appear here if I go ahead and print I also get this little message up at the top which says the server is generating a PDF file for correct up to scale printing please deactivate the option fit to page and honestly I can't figure out what it's talking about because I'm not sure where that option is set to fit to page that I need to change I spent a little time yesterday digging around whether it was the browser QGIS project I couldn't find it so I'm not sure what this is talking about and I have not successfully created a printable map that looks normal the few that have at least popped something up they don't look right so I'm not sure if this is just a bug they haven't worked out yet or what but the print option does not really seem to be useful you can obviously just print your screen you can do a print screen and then copy the the image of the map and do a little bit of cropping and include that in a document not ideal options but the main purpose of this is to create an online map so hopefully they will make that print option a little bit more robust in the future but that's kind of where it's at now as far as I can tell oh and now that I think about it I don't know that I've tried this in multiple browsers either I think I've mostly been doing this in Internet Explorer so that's something else that is worth checking out whether that makes a difference okay I think I have covered everything I wanted to in this very brief introduction brief in the sense that we didn't cover all that but I just wanted to make sure that anybody that's interested in taking advantage of this would would know the basic steps and particularly if you're in Vermont or using Vermont data know that little workaround to dealing with the error that pops up let me just check if there are any other questions if people have questions this is the time to send them I think of addressed all the ones I've gotten so far but let me make sure and maybe just to review them so there was the question about creating a database and again QGIS cloud is the one that's creating the database in QGIS cloud when I did it initially it just did that automatically so if you get a message about that I believe it's just wanting you to confirm I don't know about customizing your map in terms of images and video associated with the map data and it looks like if you're using the free version of our of QGIS cloud it is indeed public your map is indeed going to be public you have to do the pro version in order to limit that both in order to limit whether your map is public and whether you and in order to limit whether your web map service is public okay someone asked a question about uploading the map but not getting the links says I created the map but I can't find it in the web page peers of use so not sure why you wouldn't see the links so just to make sure you're looking at the right place your you do have to have your QGIS cloud plug-in on so that you can see it it would be in the map tab notice that there are different tabs here and you want to be in your map tab and that's where you'll see them if it's successfully published you should see these here other than that you should be able to log into your account and also see them there so let me just try here and cute you in Chrome or actually back over here alright so here I am let's update this see what happened yeah so here I am logged into my QGIS account which I can get to by just going to QGIS cloud comm and then clicking on sign in so once I'm logged in there's home which is just third generic home page and then there's maps and maps is where you go to see where your maps to see your maps listed so these two that I've created today are listed here so in order to confirm that you actually have published maps you should be able to see them here this very folks or in order to the links for your maps the regular web map the mobile version of your web app and the WMS are all these three first words are actually links so again you could do right click Save Link As or copy link address in order to access those and then share them with others or use them somewhere else if you want here's another sort of interesting option I forgot to point out so once you've published your map let's say you go to a friend's house and they've just installed QGIS and you actually want to share your QGIS project your desktop project with them there is this option to download the QGIS project from the cloud version of it I haven't tried that yet so I don't know exactly how it's going to work I suspect it's going to work in part because it's using you know rather than needing you to have the local data on your computer it's obviously using the web map service that you created so that's why that will work just fine alright I think I think that's it I don't see any more questions just make sure oh and then the final question that I think I did answer but if you need to edit your map you just do what I did a second ago which is edited in QGIS not in QGIS cloud but in the desktop version of QGIS and then just republish it and you do it looks like you have to save it in your local instance before you can publish it so pretty simple and as long as you haven't change the name it'll just overwrite the existing just make sure it's going to overwrite the existing version of it cloud version of it yeah okay so that's it for me remember that if this is useful or you want to share it with someone else it is recorded and it will be posted at the V CGI YouTube page if you have you'll notice as you sign out that you are given a brief survey I'd appreciate it if you'd fill that out and indicate whether this was useful and also if you have requests for other sorts of webinars in the future thank you very much everyone and have a great day

Channel: VTgeospatial

Views: 32,181

Rating: 4.852941 out of 5

Keywords: GIS, VCGI, Vermont, Mapping, Maps, GIT, qgiscloud, qgis, online mapping, map app

Id: mKF5JuKRZp4

Length: 52min 39sec (3159 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 13 2016