Tutorial 27: Importing GPS data to QGIS as GPX, CSV or KML

hey guys I'm just going to do a quick tutorial on how to import GPS data of two very common standards into quantum GIS so the first thing we're going to look at is the GPX format GPS exchange format this is going to commonly come from standard recreational GPS units like garmin etrex like Magellan units or more advanced trimble units if you have access to those but they tremble units tend to be able to output shapefiles as well but GPX is just a very simple portable format that can pretty easily be brought into quantum GIS so I've got just some state boundaries here and there's a GPX file I've got for trail intersections on the the Vermont state snowmobile trail Network so here's the GPX file now you notice you're adding this as a vector layer but when you hit open it gives you a bunch of options because there are a few nested vector layers within this it's possible that it could be any one of these but the easiest way to look for the the right layer is number of features this column here you can see only one of these the waypoints layer has 886 features in it so when you hit OK it drops it in natively it's usually in latitude longitude you know standard wgs84 projection so it should work very easily with any anything else you have in there as long as you've got reproject on the fly turned on again that's up here under options with enable on-the-fly reprojection by default so the one thing you need to do before you really work with this and say this this file is turn this into a feature class of its own because right now it's just pulling from a part of that GPX file and the way you do that is right-click on the waypoints in the table of contents hit save as and then we'll save this as an SVG 8 file so we'll just call this vast point save it as a shape file you can see it's using wgs84 which is just fine for this sort of thing and then we can remove this one add our new shape file and now this is fully usable in quantum GIS for geoprocessing for symbolizing for all the above there's a certain amount of that that you can do with the original GPX file but it just is easier and better for long-term file planning to turn this into a file of its own so for the next we're gonna try importing a table of points which this is another common GPS output you'll also see it in you know scientific journals and just in a general way that people want to publish their data which is just in the form of a table that has latitude and longitude attached to it so here I have a table of these are actually tweets sent from particular locations in Vermont during Hurricane Irene a few years back but you can see there's a latitude and longitude these are just part of the Twitter API output but they're a bunch of other ways that you would you would get this into latitude and longitude form in these columns but this just happens to have it already and if you have a GPS output it will have that as well so so that is a delimited text file or you know spreadsheet table as it's more commonly known in order to bring this in we need to make sure that we have the delimited text file extension actually turned on for QGIS so we go to plugins manage plugins and just make sure that add delimited text layer is checked on and in this case it is so then we'll go to layer and add delimited text layer and this is pretty straightforward we just add the file in this case I have it in what's called a comma separated values format or CSV format instead of the standard XLS format XLS should work as well but CSV is a much more of a standard for transferring data and being able to use it between different kinds of programs so QGIS is much more comfortable with it you can very easily save a an excel file into CSV by just hitting save as and then a drop down menu you'll have the option to save it as a CSV so this we already have it as a CSV you can see our selected delimiter x' then it's going to be comma and just comma any of the others might sort of mess with it it looks for x and y fields you can see we have the option of all the fields that are in there but we're just going to choose the one that is longitude and the y field up and down is latitude you can ignore wkt regular expressions playing characters that's all more than we need and then you can see we've got a preview of the table and it seems like everything's in the right place so we'll just hit OK and that will take a little bit we'll turn off the bass points and you can see here are all of our geo-located tweets from Hurricane Irene now the same is with the GPX file you'll want to save this as a shape file just so that you can keep working with it very easily in the future finishes the export can remove that original csv file and just add the new tweets shape file and everything is in its right place with attributes attached and ready to work within quantum GIS now some GPS units and in particular mobile apps for your smartphone will increasingly be putting out files from you know your your GPS collection in KML format which as we've noted in previous tutorials is Google's standard interoperable geo data format and that has absolutely no bells and whistles about it it just works in QGIS natively like a lake a shapefile would so just to add the kml file that we used in the previous tutorial just drop it in and it shows up in the right place in QGIS already supported you'll probably see some of this data coming out in point format if you use an app like my tracks or any of the garmin apps but kml is another format that you'll see GPS data output in

Channel: Bill Morris

Views: 34,979

Rating: 4.7922077 out of 5

Keywords: qgis, gpx

Id: 0CV-G0QFHZo

Length: 6min 52sec (412 seconds)

Published: Thu May 16 2013