QGIS is a very useful tool that I often rely on for quick exploration of datasets in my work. But dear god the UI is in desperate need of a huge overhaul by someone who knows what they are doing.

Massed rows of toolbars with tiny icons, lots of unintuitive behaviour, and a few weird quirks.

It's a very powerful tool, but so much of its utility is completely inaccessible without tutorials and videos to explain it.

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tonyarkles 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Been using QGIS for about 6 years now for doing manual data analysis, as well as GDAL and Spatialite in C++ for creating/saving datasets and geopandas, Shapely, pyproj, etc for automated analysis.

QGIS is an odd duck. Part of the complexity of using it is the fundamental complexity of GIS software. There’s way more background info that I didn’t know (what do you mean a latitude and longitude doesn’t mean anything without a bunch more info?!) that’s necessary to use it effectively. All of the excellent UI in the world won’t save you if you’re not using the right coordinate system.

On the other hand… yeah, it definitely could use some love. I consider myself in roughly the amateur power user category. I don’t use it every day, but when I do fire it up once or twice a month I’m doing some heavy data analysis with it. Every time I do that I end up tripping over three or four things that seem like they should be obvious to do but aren’t. And man oh man… if there was a single bug I would love to fix: highlighted points, whether selected through the selection UI or through the data table… should always have a higher Z-order than the other points around them. The fact that you can select a bunch of points and not see them highlighted… so frustrating. You can go in and change the symbology to fix that in a number of ways but dammit it should work right out of the box. /rant

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stevage an hour ago | parent | next [-]

>There’s way more background info that I didn’t know (what do you mean a latitude and longitude doesn’t mean anything without a bunch more info?!) that’s necessary to use it effectively.

That's sort of true, but QGIS could do a much better job of helping you manage this stuff, figuring out the right CRS, helping you make sense of clashing CRS'es etc.

> highlighted points, whether selected through the selection UI or through the data table… should always have a higher Z-order than the other points around them

I haven't come across that one much, but generally I wish the UI around querying data was much better. First it takes me ages to find the one specific tiny little button which lets you query stuff, then you have to remember to pick which layer you want to query, etc etc.

It's the most obvious mode, and should be the default, and not buried amongst a dozen other icons I'll never use.

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jasona123 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hard agree on it being odd in both GIS ways and QGIS ways. I just started a new job that pays for ArcGIS Pro and it’s wild how something that seemed intuitive to find on QGIS is buried under menus on Arc Pro, but conversely I’ve definitely seen things that I’m like “that was almost too easy why doesn’t QGIS have this”. And then you have the oddities of GIS

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renmillar 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> what do you mean a latitude and longitude doesn’t mean anything without a bunch more info?!

Is the more info just the coordinate system like WGS84, or am I missing something else?

	▲	tonyarkles 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		There are many different coordinate systems that aren’t WGS84, and there are different epochs associated with them as well. Some of the use latitude and longitude, some of them use easting/northing, etc. The worst part is that if you don’t get it exactly right, you’ll still get answers that look right but are shifted by maybe 1-3m. As an example, we had a field team out with a Trimble survey stick with RTK (nominal accuracy 1-2cm) that they were using to cross-check data from our aerial survey platform. We had laid out a bunch of targets on the ground, which they surveyed the corners for. Most of the time there was a fantastic match between the aerial survey data and the ground truth data, but occasionally there was a pretty large offset. As I discovered WAY too late, exactly one of the cellphones that ran the Trimble app had its coordinate system set to one of the Canadian CSRS frames instead of WGS84: https://natural-resources.canada.ca/science-data/science-res... Edit: naturally, they just handed me the coordinates in a CSV file that they’d captured. The Trimble app + whatever data collection app didn’t actually record the reference frame.

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berryg 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Used QGis for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Could only used it with the help of ChatGPT. But, I got what I wanted in a reasonable amount of time.

	▲	navbaker 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The website has some really good tutorials you can knock out in an afternoon that teach you the basics of using the interface, along with the more important stuff about GIS terminology and jargon.