QGIS Plugins

Tuesday, 9 October, 2012

I was presenting at the Society of Cartographers last month (on LAAP for those interested). Mike Shand gave an “Introduction to QGIS” (some helpful links on that page) which reminded me that I had wanted to do this blog post…..namely that “as it ships”, QGIS is pretty powerful but if you want to run through a complete project workflow you’ll rapidly find yourself up against a brickwall. It’s not that it can’t do much geospatial processing, but rather a lot of this functionality comes as plugins that have been developed separately. My MSc students hit this in their spatial analysis module - they perform an analysis in ArcGIS and then re-do it in QGIS. So this year I asked them to collate a list of “must have” plugins. So here it is and please feel free to suggest additions:

1. fTools: vector data analysis and management
2. Table Manager: edits and deletes shapefile columns
3. Spatial Query: conduct spatial queries on vector layers
4. Plugin Installer: download and install python plugins
5. MMQGIS: manipulates vector map layers, including alot of CSV functionality.
6. SEXTANTE: provides front ends to SAGA, GRASS, Orpheo Toolbox, MMQGIS etc. Think ArcToolbox for QGIS (to be rolled in to QGIS 2.0)

Sometimes there is an issue with a particular build so its always worth trying the master nightly build over at the QGIS Wiki.