Select shapes in one layer that overlap with shapes from another layer?

Question

This question is a duplicate of this: How to select only polygons that overlap with another layer?

But in my question I want to know how to do this in QGIS not in ArcGIS. I want to be able to select shapes in one layer if they intersect /overlap shapes in another layer.

Intersection does not work because it gives me these odd silver polygons:

Because both the shapefiles are not perfectly aligned, it gives those small odd shapes, I would like to instead select entire shapes and not intersect the layers.

Answer 1

Use the Select by location tool from the Processing Toolbox. Use "intersects" as the geometry predicate. This will select the intersecting polygons without cutting them.

If you want to extract the intersecting polygons to a separate layer, you can either

• use the select by location tool to select the intersecting polygons, then right click on the layer > export > export selected features
• or use the extract by location tool to extract the intersecting polygons in one step