Displaying points on OpenLayers with correct CRS

Question

I have previously used QGIS but not for a while.

I just installed 2.14 (Essen) and the OpenLayers plugin.

I want to display a basic csv of thousands of points (mostly in USA) each with a latitude and longitude (mostly near the East Coast, e.g.

40.749473   -73.994262

1. I set project to Pseudo Mercator.
2. I import the csv as a layer (delimited), set it correctly and identify longitude and latitude as X/Y (correctly).
3. I turn on OpenLayers OSM (tried with Google too)
4. All with the same CRs (Pseudo Mercator - EPSG 3587), on the fly transformations

But... my points still all end up in the sea off Africa (see second image in link below)... but they are admittedly distributed in the right places, just as if the USA was really tiny and floating in the sea (the big cluster in the first image is NYC, then one/some in Europe and a few in West USA).

http://imgur.com/a/4P0bj

I feel like I must be doing something obviously wrong here, any tips?

Answer 1

You made a mistake setting the CRS for your csv file. In the layer property dialog change the CRS to EPSG:4326 WGS84. Enable on the fly CRS transformation in the Project properties window. The project CRS must be WGS84/Pseudo Mercator in case of Openlayers plugin. You had better to use Quick Map Services plugin instead Openlayers. QMS allow CRS transformation on tile layers (e.g. Google).