Creating polygon based on view extent in QGIS 1.8

Question

I am looking for a very simple thing. I want to create a polygon based on the current view extent of my project.

In fact I want to:

1. open google satellite layers
2. zoom to my area of interest
3. create a polygon based on the 'view extent'

of course, the GE layer is not important, it should work with any view.view

Answer 1

Sounds like spatial bookmarks - maybe that's also an option.

But given that you have a current polygon layer in the same CRS as the project, you can do this in the python console to add a new feature with the current extent:

f = QgsFeature()
f.setGeometry(QgsGeometry.fromRect(qgis.utils.iface.mapCanvas().extent()))
l = qgis.utils.iface.activeLayer()
l.startEditing()
l.addFeature(f)
l.commitChanges()

Answer 2

I have found the optimal answer (sorry @Jef, I started digging into the Python console, and will continue, but this one was quicker).

The QMarxan plugin allows for creating a grid from the view extent.

Answer 3

QGIS 3.10 introduced 2 new tools (or maybe in earlier versions). With it, you can convert layer features to bookmarks or vice versa:

Convert layer to spatial bookmarks

Convert spatial bookmarks to layer

Answer 4

I had this need in QGIS 3x and the following workflow allowed me to quickly create the polygons.

In the map layout I got the map to the scale and extent required and checked the extent values in item properties for the frame.

I put these into a Google Sheet - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DIkh3neqY_aF0jLjv8myjzG16ncx92DyobBSH22scdU/edit?usp=sharing

I then imported them into QGIS as Polygon WKT

This gave me the polygons I needed for an atlas.