It’s easy to get the benefits of Touch GIS as your field mapping app while still using QGIS for the more intensive analytical or publishing parts of your workflow.
While there are many GIS mobile apps available, Touch GIS is the most user-friendly GIS for iPad, making it a great field data collection app for anyone regardless of how comfortable they are with technology.
In this post we’ll walk through how this GIS mapping workflow comes together to save you time and energy.
If you prefer to watch a video demonstrating this workflow, skip to the end of the post.
Sending field data to QGIS
Both apps support multiple import and export formats, so there are a few different ways you can utilize them together. For this example, we’re going to use the Keyhole Markup Language (KML) format, but you could just as easily use GeoJSON or ESRI Shapefiles.
To start, open your project in Touch GIS and locate the data you want to share in the layers menu. You can export the entire project at the top level of the layer tree, or you can drill down into a single layer or set of layers.
Once you’ve located the folder you want to share to QGIS, tap on the Share button and select the KMZ format, which is a KML file that’s been compressed to make the files smaller and more efficient.
After the file is generated, you will be presented with menu to choose where you want to send the newly generated file. At this point, it’s easiest to use a shared drive like iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, or Microsoft OneDrive, but you can also send it via Airdrop or email to your desktop device. To use a shared drive select “Save to Files” and then find the drive in the file picker.
Once saved onto your shared drive or your desktop device, it’s time to open up QGIS. The easiest way to get your new data into the QGIS project is to find the file in your computer’s file browser and drag it onto the QGIS window. You can also use the built-in browser in the QGIS Desktop app to locate the file and drag it onto the map surface.
You’ll be prompted to select which items you want to import into QGIS, and how you want them to be grouped. Make your selections and click “Add Layers”
Once you’ve done that, all of your data will now be in QGIS with the correct georeferences and all the same attribute fields, as seen below!
