Book Image

QGIS 2 Cookbook

By : Alex Mandel, Víctor Olaya Ferrero, Anita Graser, Alexander Bruy
Book Image

QGIS 2 Cookbook

By: Alex Mandel, Víctor Olaya Ferrero, Anita Graser, Alexander Bruy

Overview of this book

QGIS is a user-friendly, cross-platform desktop geographic information system used to make maps and analyze spatial data. QGIS allows users to understand, question, interpret, and visualize spatial data in many ways that reveal relationships, patterns, and trends in the form of maps. This book is a collection of simple to advanced techniques that are needed in everyday geospatial work, and shows how to accomplish them with QGIS. You will begin by understanding the different types of data management techniques, as well as how data exploration works. You will then learn how to perform classic vector and raster analysis with QGIS, apart from creating time-based visualizations. Finally, you will learn how to create interactive and visually appealing maps with custom cartography. By the end of this book, you will have all the necessary knowledge to handle spatial data management, exploration, and visualization tasks in QGIS.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
QGIS 2 Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating raster overviews (pyramids)


Overviews, or pyramids, and resampling are all about making raster layers load faster when zooming and panning in your map canvas, by reducing the amount of data loaded when not zoomed in all the way.

Getting ready

You will need a large raster image.

Tip

Generally, you want to make a copy of the data as this method will likely alter the original file if you choose to make 'internal' pyramids (easy to do on accident).

How to do it…

  1. Load your raster in QGIS. elev_lid792_1m.tif will work fine for this example.

  2. Right-click on the layer name and open Properties.

  3. Go to the Pyramids item on the left:

  4. Select the image sizes that you want to create pyramids for:

    • Optionally, choose whether to store externally (safer) or internally (less files to keep track of).

    • Optionally, choose a resampling algorithm; Nearest Neighbor is the simplest, but other methods may look smoother at the cost of more data manipulation and compute time

  5. Click on Build pyramids.

  6. When this is completed...