QGIS users - What plugins do you consider to be essential?

Question

The title says it all - vector, raster, geoprocessing plugins?

Answer 1

There are so many, but the top ones for me are:

Atlas - Only been available for a couple of weeks but use it all the time since. Allows you to create map books easily. Saved me a lot of time on a project with a pipeline split into 20 maps - all I had to do was provide the plugin with a layer of polygons for the locations of each map and a composer and it automatically turns each composer into an image file.

Numerical Digitise - Allows you to provide coordinates to create features. Very useful for creating a point at an exact coordinate quickly when someone gives me a site location rather than trying to click in the right location on the map.

Time manager - Allows you to view data which has a time element to it. We use it to visualise ecological data over the course of a survey - looking to see if there are any parts of a study site that have more data at certain times of the survey period and where and when the most data occurs.

Memory Layer (and memory layer saver) - like the cosmetic layer in MapInfo - really good for creating a quick object that you do not want to save to a shapefile/database.

Import project - Allows you to load in layers from another project - you can choose which ones you would like to load. I find it very useful to set up a project with all of my base layers loaded and styled (like Ordnance Survey mapping, site boundaries, buffers etc), and then import these using this plugin when I am ready to incorporate them with other data.

XY tools - Allows you to load a excel/openoffice/libreoffice file as a point layer if it has coordinates in it, and also allows you to export data to the same formats. Very useful for exporting data for reports.

Ordnance Survey Translator - Imports OS MasterMap data from .gml format. Can then be styled using the styles from this website: http://www.lutraconsulting.co.uk/resources/ostranslator.

Photo2Shape - extracts georeferencing information from geotagged images. Great if you have a camera with a GPS built in for visualising the image locations in QGIS. It allows us to visualise where photos were taken on a project site so people can remember where they were when they took the photo.

Table manager - allows you to manage a tables structure (rename, insert and delete columns etc).

Shapefile splitter - can split a shapefile into separate files by the values in a column. We use this when we need to provide people with shapefiles that only contain one feature type.

Answer 2

Hard to say, they are many (more than 200 if you consider both core and contributed plugins).

Among the ones available out of the box: ftools, gdal tools, georeferencer, delimited text layer

Contributed: Database Manager, Value Tool (if you do raster analysis), Easy Print (for mapbooks) and many more...

Answer 3

PostGIS Manager is a must if you use PostGIS. Also, I like the Interpolation plugin, and OpenLayers is good for quick maps.

Answer 4

It's more of a housekeeping plugin, but Zip Layers is essential for me. I use it in two ways:

• To export vector layers to e-mail to consultants
• To archive old layers that I might want to use again, but don't want to have cluttering up the Layers pane.

The plugin creates individual zip files containing a shape file of each of the layers you select. CRS and metadata is kept intact.