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Does anyone know of a standalone program that will convert the coordinates in a shapefile to another coordinate system?

By this I mean a program outside of a full GIS package. I have customers who need to convert shape files from one coordinate system to another so the file can be displayed in one of my company's programs. I know that there are several shareware GIS programs that can do this. But I am trying to avoid having to help my customers install and learn how to use a whole GIS package just to do coordinate conversions.

My ideal program would be one where the user points to the shapefile, picks the target coordinate system, then the program writes a new shapefile, using the target coordinate system.

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  • If you have any programming ability in VB.net or C# you can use Windows forms and GDAL bindings; GDAL does the work and you can make the form as user friendly as you need to.
    – Michael Stimson
    Commented Aug 18, 2020 at 1:26
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    Got C#. will look at GDAL. Thanks.
    – BartAtRanch
    Commented Aug 18, 2020 at 1:48
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    Ah, have a look at the GISInternals distribution gisinternals.com/release.php which contains the C# bindings, make sure you select the correct bitedness (32/64) to suit your project build then reference and set gdal_csharp.dll, ogr_csharp.dll and osr_csharp.dll to copy local. There are some basic examples trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/GdalOgrCsharpUsage that should get you started. If that is too daunting there is no shame in including a cut down GDAL with OGR2OGR and calling shell commands, a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down!.
    – Michael Stimson
    Commented Aug 18, 2020 at 1:56

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A simple approach would be to use a command line tool that takes the input shapefile, reprojects the data, and outputs a new shapefile. You could just call the GDAL library (ogr2ogr has a reprojection option and supports the shapefile format). GDAL is free, lightweight, and the learning curve is minimal if you're only running one tool.

If simplicity is truly essential, you might consider not having them download/install anything and run the conversion as a service on your end using something like GeoServer, ArcGIS Enterprise, or FME Server. All of these programs offer reprojection packages that can be hosted as a service, which you could call from a web interface where they simply have to point to the file location.

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  • In my experience users in the current generation are afraid of CMD, while OGR2OGR is a great program and you can make instructions as clear as possible only a few will attempt it; in my team I had to create a Windows form to shell the commands just to get users to try GDAL, think about how much worse it would be for users with minimal GIS exposure. Can you include a link to the pages that convert shapefiles... for some reason the general populous will use a web service as a preference over a simple command line tool.
    – Michael Stimson
    Commented Aug 18, 2020 at 1:32
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    Thanks for the good suggestions. I am enough of a programmer to wrap the GDAL library in a window based application to sugar coat it. And I will explore the online services.
    – BartAtRanch
    Commented Aug 18, 2020 at 1:47

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