The aim of Time Manager plugin for QGIS is to provide comfortable browsing through temporal geodata. A dock widget provides a time slider and a configuration dialog for your layers to manage.
Add this QGIS Plugin Repositry to your repository list and allow “experimental” plugins to download Time Manager.
Time Manager can keep multiple spatio-temporal layers synchronized. You have full control over animation speed and step size. Additionally, Time Manager enables you to generate image series based on your settings with just a few clicks.
Time Manager dock GUI
I’ve been using Time Manager to visualize Tweets in Europe for example:
Time Manager is now available on Github!
Here you can find all my posts on Time Manager: “Time Manager” tag
More examples of how Time Manager has been used:
Pingback: QGIS Time Manager Example: Visualizing Storm Data | Free and Open Source GIS Ramblings
Hi,
I’m trying to get the plugin with QGIS 1.7.0 but even after adding Geofrogger as a repository, it doesn’t show as available. Do I have to build it from sources ?
Regards
Laurent
Hi Laurent,
Time Manager is tagged “experimental”, so you have to allow experimental plugins in Plugin Installer options.
Hi,
I allowed experimental plugins with no success …
Regards
Laurent
Strange, I just tested the repository again and it works.
Maybe check the repo address again: http://www.geofrogger.net/qgis_plugins/plugins.xml
And the “allowed plugins” option needs to be “show all plugins, even those marked as experimental”.
You can also download the plugin directly from: http://www.geofrogger.net/qgis_plugins/timemanager.zip
Put it into ~/.qgis/python/plugin folder and restart QGIS. The disadvantage is that you wont be notified about new versions.
Great,
It was just when I tried to find the plugin selecting the GeoFrogger repository that it didn’t show.
I’m going to test it.
Thanks
Laurent
Hi I am just wondering how you managed to get the hotspot style effect in the video was this done in QGIS? I have the time manager installed and working perfectly but need this feature to really display my data as i would like to. Any help really appreciated thanks…
Ruth
Hi Ruth,
Yes, all effects were done in QGIS. The general idea is to add the same data multiple times with different styles. Using Time Manager “Offset” feature, you can time which style to display when. Combined with layer transparency, that’s all the tricks I used. It might need some trial-and-error, but it’s worth it.
I’m planning to write a post on this topic when I find the time to.
Thanks for using Time Manager!
Thanks i’ll try it out.
Ruth
time manager is a great feature but I think the potencial is still not yet discovered by me. So the post on the topic would be very appreciated!
Regards
First of all, I think this is fantastic – I’ve had some great results from it already.
I wondered if is possible to summarize data by time only.
I have a large dataset collected over a week but I’m really interested in creating a time lapse video of the variations by day or by time of day. In my case, I’ve have the date and time in two fields so a video by day works perfectly using the%Y-%m-%d mask but it would be fantastic if I could create a video from the time field – %H.%M:%S alone as well.
Is that possible?
Thank you!
Thanks for your feedback!
I think that should be possible and I’ll try to include it into version 0.4 of Time Manager.
Wow! That would be fantastic.
Please use Field Calculator for now to prepand an arbitrary date to your time information. This way you can already use all your data.
I’ve been looking into including this format, but it comes with many implications for the rest of the plugin. For example, it won’t be able to use multiple layers (some with datetime information, some only with time information). It’s going to be necessary to include a lot of additional sanity checks.
Hi,
Time Manager looks cool. Can it be used to play through a time sequence of raster images?
Thanks!
Hi Mike,
That’s not yet possible. I haven’t had the use case and/or appropriate test data yet but it has been requested a few times.
Compared to vector data, it is less clear how to encode the time information into the raster data. Currently, the only thing I could think of was either to encode the information in the raster file name or have the user specify the information manually.
Any thoughts?
Thanks! I’d suggest regular expression that encoded the time information in the file names. It seems that most users use the file names to encode time when they play through raster data layers manually to analyze time lapse changes.
What about this data set: http://www.polarview.aq/mapview.php ?
-Mike
Hi,
how do I tell TimeManager to keep all the points in the map after they appeared? Just like in the second video featured in the page. Thank you.
That’s possible by adding and end timestamp that’s far enough in the future.
Hi there,
thank you for the great plugin!
here is a video that also uses time manager: http://matsim.org/scenario/munich
One problem remains which is the slow drawing of layers in QGIS; so if you want to export a video (or the frames) of a large layer, you will have to set the “show frame for … milliseconds” option to a high number.
In general, the animation is not very smooth within QGIS, but the plugin cannot fix that :)
Greetings,
Benjamin
Hi Benjamin,
Thank you for the link! To speed up drawing, you can try to enable “Render caching” in Options. I found it helps increase drawing speed but it can also cause crashes when interacting with Time Manager GUI. Therefore, I only use it when I export videos.
Best wishes,
Anita
Thank you Anita! I will try this out :)
Cheers,
Benjamin
Hi Anita,
The time manager is really the application i am looking for. Thanks for your excellent work!
However, there is a bug and i dont know how to solve it. Could u plz help me on that?
An error has occured while executing Python code:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “C:/Users/ngachi/.qgis/python/plugins\timemanager\timemanagercontrol.py”, line 208, in setCurrentTimePosition
timePosition = datetime.strptime( str(timePosition.toString(‘yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss.zzz’)) ,”%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f”)
File “C:\PROGRA~2\QUANTU~1\apps\Python25\lib\_strptime.py”, line 320, in strptime
(bad_directive, format))
ValueError: ‘f’ is a bad directive in format ‘%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f’
Python version:
2.5.1 (r251:54863, Apr 18 2007, 08:51:08) [MSC v.1310 32 bit (Intel)]
QGIS version:
1.7.1-Wroclaw Wroclaw, e6718b6
Hope to hear from you soon!
Thanks,
Nga
I think that is related to the Python version. OSGeo4W has updated to 2.7. The old version doesn’t seem able to cope with milliseconds. Can you update and see if that fixes it?
Hi Anita,
An error has occured while executing Python code:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “C:/Users/Aymen/.qgis/python/plugins\timemanager\timemanagercontrol.py”, line 164, in playAnimation
if currentTime IndexError: tuple index out of range
Version de Python :
2.7.2 (default, Jun 12 2011, 15:08:59) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)]
Version de QGIS :
1.7.4-Wroclaw Wroclaw, 411aff6
Hi Aymen,
Please use the issue tracker at https://github.com/anitagraser/TimeManager/issues?direction=desc&sort=created&state=open to report issues.
Please also include which plugin version you are using and how to reproduce the bug.
Thank you!
Hi Anita, I’m developing a C++ plugin for Qgis and I want to filter/override the mouse-wheel event. I created a “maptool” to select a polygon feature on a vector layer, the feature has two attributes : an id & an integer H. I want to override the mouse wheel event so that once I select a polygon, the wheel will allow me to change (increment/decrement) the value of attribute H and not zoom/unzoom the mapcanvas!
I created and “eventFilter” on my plugin’s base class which I install on the mapcanvas (QgsMapCanvas::installEventFilter()) once my maptool is activated, works fine to filter a key press for example but when it comes to the mouse-wheel it seems that it bypasses the eventFilter and does the usual zoom/unzoom action !!
Any ideas on how to solve this problem?
Thank you !
Sorry, I don’t know. Please contact the QGIS developer list where you will find people who actually know C++.
Greetings underdark,
FYI, my organization – LICADHO, a Cambodian rights watchdog NGO – made use of your excellent plugin to create a time-lapse representation of land concession granting over a period of 20 years. The resulting video has turned out to be quite a convincing piece of argument.
The video can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySF22KjLlk8
Thought you might be interested in seeing example of what people have been doing out of your efforts : )
A few points were noted while using your plugin to build the video and I was wondering whether we could discuss some more over email. I’ll leave my address attached to this comment.
Kudos again for your work!
Thank you for your feedback Mathieu. Please feel free to add any enhancement requests you have to https://github.com/anitagraser/TimeManager. We can discuss them there so everything is well documented. Best wishes.
Hi Anita, here a beginner with QGIS, which I like very much the potential it has for users and developers (plugins and standalone applications).
I’ve read somewhere you developed this plugin with Spyder (http://packages.python.org/spyder/ and http://code.google.com/p/spyderlib/). Am I right? It looks nice.
How did you configured Spyder to use it with PyQGIS libraries. I tried to do it, modifying the qgis.bat (the last line which begins with Start…) but without success. Instead, doing the same with Monkey Studio, it worked ok. Any clue? Thanks in advance.
Hi Luis,
I didn’t go through the trouble of configuring Spyder. I just use it as an editor with syntax highlighting and ipython shell.
Can you add format support for dates with timezones? I’ve got data stored in PostGIS as “timestamps with time zone” e.g.: 2012-04-25 16:05:36-06
Hi Brent! Please use Github to report feature requests: https://github.com/anitagraser/TimeManager/issues?direction=desc&sort=created&state=open. Thanks!