Is there an automatic function in QGIS to package all shapefiles in a project for transferability?

Question

In my project, I use a lot of geodata from different directories. Now I want to give the QGIS project to a colleague (eg on a CD).

Is it possible to copy the shapes from different directories automatically to one directory?

I am grateful for any help.

Thanks Hendrik

Answer 1

You're looking for the QConsolidate plugin, which works very well. It will transfer everything to a single directory and rewrite the .QGS project file (an XML file) to point to the new source locations.

Answer 2

I don't know about a way in QGIS itself, but the project file (.qgs) is just a text file. Therefore a primitive but effective way would be to copy everything manually into one directory, then alter the <datasource></datasource> tags in the .qgs file either using find and replace or a regular expression to point to the new directory.

If you've got a lot of different files/directories, one option would be to automate it in python by searching for each tag in the .qgs file, copying each related file with that name to a directory, and then replacing the .qgs tag with the new directory.