Meet the QGIS Hub — sharing is caring!

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2026-10-13
GIS, QGIS
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Everyone knows the QGIS Plugin Repo but have you had a look at the QGIS Hub yet?

It’s similar to the plugin repository in that it allows sharing of resources between community members, but it so many different types of resources, that warrants multiple blog posts: from styles and projects all the way to processing scripts.

Today, I want to have a look at the (a little cryptic) QLR option.

The QGIS Layer Definition (QLR) format makes it possible to share “complete” QGIS layers with other QGIS users. QLR files contain links to the data sources and all the QGIS style information necessary to style the layer.

To test the features, I uploaded QLRs for the two BEV basemap COGs I first wrote about a few weeks ago.

The cool thing about sharing the COGs like this is that: 1. users don’t have to mess with the COG URLs and 2. the QLR stores styling information such as the recommended raster resampling settings which were previously only available in the dataset documentation.

To use the resources from the hub in QGIS, you’ll want to install the QGIS Hub plugin:

Once installed, this plugin will show you all the resources published on the hub:

As you can see, we are only just starting out and there are not many QLRs uploaded yet.

So I’d like to encourage you join our efforts and share, for example, your national basemap layer definition files with the QGIS community.

It’s never been so easy.

To create a QLR, just right-click a layer in QGIS and go to Export | Save as Layer Definition File.

To share a QLR, head to hub.qgis.org, log in, and upload.

And there is good news regarding logins: besides the good old OSGeo account, you can now use third party accounts from Github or Google (I think more options are to come) to log into the hub:

Big thanks to the QGIS infrastructure team who have been working on this feature during the contributor meeting last week!

QGIS tabbed ribbon UI experiments

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2026-09-29
GIS
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A long-standing feature request in the QGIS repo has been an option for a ribbon-style GUI to replace the plethora of toolbars that usually characterize the top rows of any QGIS window.

A couple of months ago Eithan published an experimental “Ribbon Toolbar” plugin for QGIS 3 that implemented a first version of this idea.

I recently picked up the threads, ported the plugin to QGIS 4 and continued refining the structure of the tabs and ribbons, cleaning up truncated labels, design logical groups, and making icons for the most commonly used functions (based on my subjective experience, not objectively measured) large / more prominent:

The new updated version 0.5 is now available from the QGIS Plugin Repo for you to give it a spin.

Please note, however, that the code is NOT intended to be production-ready. Consider this a click-dummy that should facilitate discussion.

This version doesn’t implemented any way yet to customize the ribbons. Of course, this could be added at a later stage. In any case, the user can, of course, switch back to good old toolbars at any time.

Overall, the design is heavily inspired by LibreOffice’s ribbon theme option and targets new users / teaching situations. Like in LibreOffice, the idea would be to enable users to pick the type of UI style that they prefer — so there won’t be a on-size-fits-all i.e. fits-nobody situation.

One tricky part will certainly be the handling of plugins. Right now (as of version 0.5), installing a plugin that adds a new toolbar will, initially, add this toolbar and you can place it anywhere (e.g. below or right next to the ribbons):

Once you restart QGIS, the Ribbon Toolbar plugin will pick up on this new toolbar and will integrate it into the plugins ribbon:

Obviously, this behavior is not sustainable for users who have installed a lot of plugins. Therefore, we’ll need a clever way to allow users to customize the handling of plugin toolbars. Maybe just a small button to pop them out of the ribbon or attach them back.

In any case, if you have ideas and/or feedback for the ribbon design, we’d love to hear from you in the related thread.

If you have other design proposal that you want to share, I’d love to read about them. Please drop a link below.

How to QGIS 4.2 on Linux Mint (Sept ’26)

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2026-09-18
GIS, QGIS
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For a while now, my preferred way of installing QGIS has been from conda-forge. However, while we’re waiting for QGIS 4 to become available on conda-forge, there are alternatives:

Option 1: Flatpak

In the Software Manager, you can find QGIS from Flathub in two different versions: stable and lts. And stable should give you 4.2 (even if the Software Manager preview shows an older one):

Option 2: Meet the official QGIS Docker Images

First off, you’ll need Docker. If you haven’t installed it yet, it’s directly available from the Linux Mint Software Manager:

From there on, we just switch to the Terminal for the rest.

If you get “permission denied while trying to connect to the docker API” when running any of the following commands, you may have to add your user account to the docker group:

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker # or just log out and back in

Afterwards, it should be straightforward to get the image from Docker Hub, e.g.:

docker pull qgis/qgis:4.2.2-questing

And once it’s downloaded, we can launch QGIS:

xhost +local:docker
docker run --rm -it --name qgis \ 
  -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \ 
  -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY \ 
  qgis/qgis:4.2.2-questing qgis

Voilá, QGIS 4!

To persist your QGIS profile/settings across container runs, mount a local folder to the config path, e.g.:

docker run --rm -it --name qgis \ 
  -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \ 
  -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY \ 
  -v ~/.qgis-docker-profile:/root/.local/share/QGIS \ 
  qgis/qgis:4.2.2-questing qgis

Of course, last but not least, we’ll also need access to our data, so let’s mount a data directory as well, e.g.:

docker run --rm -it --name qgis \
  -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
  -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY \
  -e LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 \
  -v ~/.qgis-docker-profile:/root/.local/share/QGIS \
  -v /mnt/ssd1/Geodata:/data \
  qgis/qgis:4.2.2-questing qgis

Fancy a bit of a stress test? I happened to find a project file written by QGIS 2.19 🫢

Yes, my friend, this project file is indeed a litte bit older … but hey, that doesn’t look too bad at all! Some icons seem to be off but, otherwise, looks like winter is coming.

On a side note, whom do I need to ping to the QGIS logo in the System Package / Software Manager updated?

MovingPandas is moving to Codeberg

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2026-09-14
GIS
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I’ve been testing Codeberg for over a year now, with Trajectools being the largest repo that has already moved its headquarters from Github to Codeberg.

I have been very happy with the experience so far and – at the same time – I couldn’t help but notice the further decline of Github performance.

Therefore, in the upcoming weeks, I am planning to move the remaining MovingPandas repos. For anyone who wants to contribute, this means that:

  • All further development will move to Codeberg.
  • GH repos will remain as read-only mirrors for now.
  • Issue trackers and pull requests on GH will be deactivated.

MovingPandas 0.23 released!

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2026-08-09
Mobility Data Science, MovingPandas
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The new MovingPandas release 0.23 has just landed in pypi and conda-forge and I want to share with you two highlights:

New HTML representations

The new HTML representations for Trajectory & TrajectoryCollection objects aim to make interactive data exploration in notebooks more convenient by providing commonly required descriptive data summaries and data previews in a structured way.

Before 0.23

New in 0.23

Trajectory distance measures

The second highlight of this release are three new trajectory distance measure functions, covering:

These are in addition to the already existing minimum distance and Hausdorff distance.

You can see them in action in the updated Measuring distances tutorial.

New Open Basemaps for Austria

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2026-07-26
Cartography, GIS, OpenGovermentData, QGIS
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For many years now, we have been enjoying the basemap.at service with it’s various basemap options (color, gray, with/without labels, …) in WMTS and vector tiles.

Basemap.at Standard WMTS in QGIS (instructions here)

For a few weeks now, there is an additional service by BEV: Their cartographic models “Kartographische Modelle (KM)” are now available as raster (KM-R) in COG-TIFF format.

Adding the COG-TIFF URI

The downloads come with proper instructions:

BEV KM-R in QGIS

Some vector (KM-V) in GeoPackages with QGIS projects providing the layer style and label settings are already available for the Stichtag 30.01.2026 downloads. And they look awesome:

BEV KM-V project defaults
And without labels

KM-V downloads are provided in tiles, so it’s not quite as simple as grabbing the COG URI:

It’s worth noting though, that the KM-V GeoPackages are still a work in progress and not all tiles are available for download yet.

I’ll keep an eye on the downloads to see when the rest of the tiles become available.

Until then, I leave you with a couple of examples of the Großglockner (highest mountain in Austria) area in basemap.at and KM-R side-by-side:

Belém, Salzburg, and onwards

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2026-07-11
Mobility Data Science, QGIS
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It’s been a couple of busy weeks, with the QGIS 4.2 release and meetings and conferences all over the place before a few, hopefully quieter, weeks of summer break.

QGIS

The Austrian QGIS user group met online on 25 June to exchange experiences with different webmapping solutions, ranging from QGIS+Lizmap to QGIS Cloud.

A few days later, QGIS 4.2 was released on 3 July 2026. This release is named Belém do Pará, after the Brazilian city that hosted both FOSS4G and a QGIS user meeting back in 2024. MundoGEO has the details on the naming, if you’re curious about the backstory. Worth noting: 4.2 “Belém do Pará” will be the next LTR, so if you’re using the long-term release, this is the one to watch for.

What I found interesting while designing the Belém splash screen was that historic maps of Belém don’t have north at the top. Instead, they’re rotated with north pointing either left or right. A nice little reminder that “north-up” is just a convention and not a law of cartography.

Historic map of Belém used in the QGIS 4.2 splash screen. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Planta_da_Cidade_de_Belem_do_Gram_Par%C3%A1_(ca._1773).jpg

AGIT 2026

This week, I made my way to Salzburg for AGIT, my favorite Austrian GIS conference.

On the first day, I took part in the AGEO Podium discussion, together with Andreas Hocevar (the father of OpenLayers), Clemens Portele, and Soyol Marksteiner on the OGC API standards, since many users aren’t even aware of these new standards yet.

MobiML architecture overview. Photo by Michael Szell. Source: https://datasci.social/@mszll/116889779516757509

Thursday was talk day for me: I presented MobiML, a new Python library designed to streamline the development of machine learning workflows for trajectory data. I hope this library can help make Mobility Data Science more approachable and results more reproducible.

Right after my talk, Michael Szell presented “Assessing the Danish Bicycle Node Network”, building the data and algorithm foundation for active mobility planning and research. If you want to dig into the tools behind it, check out bikenetwork.dk and bikenetkit.org.

Michael is giving a full talk on this on Tuesday at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, if you want to hear more.

FOSS4G Europe, from the sidelines

Unfortunately, I missed FOSS4G Europe in Timișoara the week before, so I followed along via the #foss4ge2026 hashtag instead. Iván Sánchez’s talk on the BOSCO ruling, arguing that all government software must be explainable, is just one example of the talks I would have loved to see in person. There was also the already traditional QGIS Feature Frenzy by Kurt Menke and a QGIS hydrological analysis workshop by Hans who also has a full FOSS4G Europe 2026 summary worth reading.

Also relevant: the Birds of a Feather session on AI in OSGeo projects has spilled over onto the OSGeo discuss mailing list. Definitely a thread worth following or getting involved in if you maintain or contribute to open source geospatial projects.

What’s next

Besides MobiML, work also continues on the MovingPandas front. There are a few open pull requests I want to work through ahead of the next release.

After the summer break, the conference season picks back up quickly: FOSS4G 2026 in Hiroshima (30 August–5 September), Spatial Data Science across Languages (SDSL) 2026 in Jena (16–17/18 September), and the QGIS conference 2026 in Switzerland (5–6 October), where I’ll be speaking about AI in the QGIS ecosystem.

For a more complete picture of what is going on in geospatial worldwide, check out (and don’t forget to bookmark) Jakub‘s comprehensive list of geospatial conferences at github.com/Nowosad/geospatial-conferences.

Notebooks in QGIS

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2026-01-10
GIS, QGIS
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Finally it’s here: Jupyter notebooks inside QGIS. I don’t know about you but I’ve been hoping for someone to get around to doing this for quite a while.

Qiusheng Wu published the first version of the Notebook plugin on 26 Dec 2025. Late Christmas present?!

For the setup, there’s a handy tutorial by Hans van der Kwast and, additionally, Qiusheng published an intro video:

Development is going fast (version 0.3.0 at the time of writing) so there will be new features when you install / update the plugin compared to both the tutorial and the video.

The user interface is pretty stripped down with just a few buttons to add new code or markdown cells and to run them. And there is a neat drop-down menu with all kinds of ready-made code snippets to get you started:

For other functionalities, for example, to delete cells, you need to right-click on the cell to access the function through the context menu. And, as far as I can tell, there is currently no way to rearrange cells (moving them up or down).

I also haven’t quite understood yet what kinds of outputs are displayed and which are not because – quite often – the cell output just stays empty, even though the same code generates output on the console:

Some of the plugin settings I would have liked to experiment with, such as adjusting the font size or enabling line numbers, don’t seem to work yet. So a little more patience seems to be necessary.

I’ll definitely keep an eye on this one :)

QGIS to (Geo)Pandas – part 3

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2025-12-03
GIS, QGIS
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The journey continues: QgsArrowIterator is now merged! This makes it possible to iterate over QgsFeatures as Arrow batches.

This is where we are now, quoting Dewey Dunnington: 

import geopandas
from nanoarrow.c_array import allocate_c_array
import qgis
from qgis.core import QgsVectorLayer

# Create a vector layer
layer = QgsVectorLayer("tests/testdata/zonalstatistics/polys.shp", "layer_name", "ogr")
schema = qgis.core.QgsArrowIterator.inferSchema(layer)

it = qgis.core.QgsArrowIterator(layer.getFeatures())
it.setSchema(schema, 1)

c_array = allocate_c_array()
schema.exportToAddress(c_array.schema._addr())
it.nextFeatures(5, c_array._addr())

print(geopandas.GeoDataFrame.from_arrow(c_array))
#> lev3_name                                           geometry
#> 0    poly_1  MULTIPOLYGON (((100.37934 -0.96049, 100.37934 ...
#> 1    poly_2  MULTIPOLYGON (((100.37944 -0.96044, 100.37955 ...
#> 2    poly_3  MULTIPOLYGON (((100.37938 -0.96049, 100.37949 ...

print(geopandas.read_file("tests/testdata/zonalstatistics/polys.shp"))
#> lev3_name                                           geometry
#> 0    poly_1  POLYGON ((100.37934 -0.96049, 100.37934 -0.960...
#> 1    poly_2  POLYGON ((100.37944 -0.96044, 100.37955 -0.960...
#> 2    poly_3  POLYGON ((100.37938 -0.96049, 100.37949 -0.960...

Further improvements are already being planned. To quote from the ticket:

“The final state after this improvement would be a compact way for Arrow Python consumers like GeoPandas to ergonomically consume a layer. Maybe:

geopandas.GeoDataFrame.from_arrow(qgis_layer_object)

Or maybe:

geopandas.GeoDataFrame.from_arrow(qgis_layer_object.getArrowStream())

Looking forward to seeing this develop further.

QGIS to (Geo)Pandas follow-up

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2025-10-31
QGIS
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The conversation around Looking for better ways to convert between QGIS VectorLayer and (Geo)DataFrame is continuing over at https://fosstodon.org/@underdarkGIS/115442614331293320

What I’ve learned so far:

Exciting times for spatial data science tooling 🤩