DARREN COPE

A while back, I worked on a project that required the conversion of a number of KML/KMZ (Google Earth) raster files into vector format (don’t ask!) Because there were a lot of files, it was painstaking to manually geo-reference the files after unzipping the KMZ to extract the raster files. I dug around on the […]

Quite often, I’ll run across a large or complex shapefile that causes issues (crashing, very poor performance, etc) in QGIS or other desktop GIS. However, sometimes you have to find a way to deal with these files, and not spend a lot of time worrying about them. Often, the best way is to head back […]

If you’ve ever used the excellent Atlas functionality feature in QGIS, you know that you can make some very nice map books (‘atlases’ in QGIS parlance) with feature-driven layouts, titles, styling, etc.. This functionality is becoming more and more advanced in recent releases. Yesterday, I was working on an atlas, and wanted to label only […]

Today I found myself trying to create a ‘midpoint’ on a large shapefile line layer. QGIS doesn’t have a tool to do this, and because the layer was large, I really didn’t want to mess around converting file formats to stick it into a database. However, similar to my last post about Creating Points On […]

If you’ve ever had to create a point on a polygon surface, you fairly quickly realize that there’s a lack of easy tools that will perform this task. Almost every desktop GIS package will create a ‘centroid,’ but that doesn’t work when you need to find a point that’s guaranteed to fall on the surface […]