Book Image

QGIS Python Programming Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Joel Lawhead
Book Image

QGIS Python Programming Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Joel Lawhead

Overview of this book

QGIS is a desktop geographic information system that facilitates data viewing, editing, and analysis. Paired with the most efficient scripting language—Python, we can write effective scripts that extend the core functionality of QGIS. Based on version QGIS 2.18, this book will teach you how to write Python code that works with spatial data to automate geoprocessing tasks in QGIS. It will cover topics such as querying and editing vector data and using raster data. You will also learn to create, edit, and optimize a vector layer for faster queries, reproject a vector layer, reduce the number of vertices in a vector layer without losing critical data, and convert a raster to a vector. Following this, you will work through recipes that will help you compose static maps, create heavily customized maps, and add specialized labels and annotations. As well as this, we’ll also share a few tips and tricks based on different aspects of QGIS.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
QGIS Python Programming Cookbook - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Creating a KML image overlay for a raster


Google Earth is one of the most widely available geospatial viewers in existence. The XML data format used by Google Earth for geospatial data is called KML. The Open Geospatial Consortium adopted KML as a data standard. Converting rasters into a KML overlay compressed in a KMZ archive file is a very popular way to make data available to end users who know how to use Google Earth.

Getting ready

We will use the SatImage raster again available at the following URL if you haven't downloaded it from previous recipes:

https://github.com/GeospatialPython/Learn/raw/master/SatImage.zip

Place this raster in your /qgis_data/rasters directory.

How to do it...

In this recipe, we'll create a KML document describing our image. Then we'll convert the image to a JPEG in memory using GDAL's specialized virtual file system and write all of the contents directly to a KMZ file using Python's zipfile module.

  1. Start QGIS.

  2. From the Plugins menu, select Python Console.

  3. We need...