The QGISUC2025 team has done an awesome job recording and editing the conference presentations. All “presentation” type talks where the presenter has accepted to be published are now available in a dedicated list on the QGIS Youtube channel.

I also had the pleasure of presenting our Trajectools plugin and you can see this talk here:

Thank you to all the organizers, speakers, and participants for the great time!

It was such a pleasure to be part of the QGIS User Conference 2025 in Norrköping! The event was extremely well organised — a big thank you to the amazing local team for pulling it all together so smoothly. Personally, it felt special to be back in Sweden, almost 20 years after my Uppsala university days. I truly enjoyed giving the opening keynote and sharing the latest from the QGIS project — and of course, showcasing all the QField greatness we’ve been working so hard on 💚

🚀 Talks & Presentations

🎊 QGIS.org updates

As Chair of the QGIS.org association, I had the opportunity to share recent updates from the QGIS community. I spoke about ongoing development efforts, community growth, funding initiatives, and collaborations that help keep the project moving forward.
The focus was on the people who make QGIS possible — contributors, sponsors, local user groups, and everyday users — and how their involvement continues to shape the project’s direction and ensure its long-term sustainability.

👉 Slides here (unfortunately keynotes and workshops were not recorded)

💡 Extending QFieldCloud – Ideas and Practical Examples

In this talk, Michael, one of our Full stack GeoNinja and Web Cartography teacher, explained how QFieldCloud can be extended by integrating additional Django apps. This allowed, for example, the generation of QField projects, reacting to events from fieldwork, adding new websites and APIs, and executing entire QGIS models as QFieldCloud jobs.

After a technical introduction, various practical examples were explored. It was shown how OpenStreetMap data can be fully automated to download offline-capable QField projects. Attendees got inspired by how an own WebGIS is brought to life in QFieldCloud using OpenLayers. Furthermore, he demonstrated how remote sensing data can be downloaded, analysed in a QGIS pipeline, and the results made available in QField projects. Finally, the discussion focused on how these capabilities can be optimally used in combination with QField plugins.

🛣️ SIGNALO: An Open-Source Solution for Mapping Road Signs in QGIS

Presented by Denis, our Industry Solution Team Lead, SIGNALO is a QGIS-based solution for mapping road signs, powered by a PostGIS database. It addresses the challenge of representing vertical data on maps while ensuring compliance with Swiss norms, yet remains highly customizable for use at local, regional, or national levels. Moreover, the flexible design allows for easy adaptation to other countries.

In this talk, Denis explored both the technical foundations of the project and the organizational strategies that enable its open-source development.

📱 1.5 Million Reasons to Use QField

In this talk, I shared our vision for the future of QField — the world’s most popular open-source mobile GIS solution. With over 1.4 million downloads and 500,000 active users, QField is making a real difference for fieldwork around the globe.
I spoke about where we’re headed next, what new features are coming, and how we at OPENGIS.ch are working to empower professionals across all sectors with powerful, flexible, and open tools for mobile geospatial workflows.

💧 Standardizing Groundwater Data Collection with QField

We were excited to see Alexandra Nozik from the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) present her work on a QField project designed to standardize groundwater data collection in remote tropical regions. The setup uses QGIS layers, predefined parameters, and metadata standards to ensure high-quality, consistent field data. Integrated with QFieldCloud, the workflow improves data accuracy, reduces data loss, and enables real-time collaboration. The project will be published on GitHub as a ready-to-use package, supporting reliable and comparable groundwater data collection across the scientific community.

📱 QField and QFieldCloud - seamless fieldwork for QGIS

In this workshop, Zsanett, QField Product Manager, went through the complete fieldwork process: setting up a QGIS project, publishing the project via QFieldCloud, collecting data via the QField mobile app and synchronising the field data back to your main dataset in the office. QField works on top of QGIS and allows users to set up maps and forms in QGIS on their workstation and deploy them in the field. QField uses QGIS’s data providers (OGR, GDAL, PostGIS and others) and supports most common file formats. QField combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology that allows intuitive viewing and editing of data. QField’s map rendering is supported by the QGIS rendering engine, so the results are identical and the full range of styling options available on the desktop is available. Editing forms in QField respect the QGIS configuration and are optimised for touch interaction. QFieldCloud makes field collaboration much easier. Participants learned about configuring users with different rights, collecting offline and online data, and synchronizing field data and QGIS project data.

🚀 Our first international QField Day

On June 4th, the first international QField Day took place in Norrköping, right after the QGIS User Conference. This free half-day event was dedicated to QField, QFieldCloud, and the mobile GIS community, bringing together users, contributors, and developers for an afternoon of field-tested workflows, live demos, community stories, and open discussions. It was a great opportunity to connect, exchange ideas, and explore the future of mobile geospatial tools in the open-source ecosystem.
Definitely not our last one. 💚

🤝 Supporting Open Source

We were proud to support QGIS UC25 in Norrköping, Sweden, as Platinum Sponsors — reaffirming our commitment to the open-source geospatial community and the continued growth of the QGIS ecosystem.

👋 Looking Ahead

We’re already looking forward to the next gathering — QGIS UC26 will take place in Switzerland 🇨🇭!

After the conference, I joined the contributor meeting along with four QGIS developers from OPENGIS.ch. It was a fantastic chance to collaborate in person, help shape the future of QGIS, and reconnect with old friends from the community.

This past Tuesday in Bern, the Swiss QGIS community came together for the 2025 edition of the QGIS.ch User Meeting — and we at OPENGIS.ch were proud to be deeply involved across the entire event, from presentations to hands-on workshops.

Sharing Insights and Innovation

The day began with our CEO, Marco Bernasocchi, opening the conference with an update on the QGIS project, covering exciting news about the upcoming QGIS 4 release and the ongoing website revamp (slides here). Shortly after, he took the stage again to present the latest improvements in QField, including new features, user experience (UX) enhancements, and under-the-hood upgrades that continue to enable efficient field data collection (slides here).

In collaboration with Timothée Produit from IG Group SA, our colleague Isabel Kiefer presented tools and streamlined processes for installing, managing, and updating TEKSI (and other) modules. These solutions are a testament to our mission of simplifying complex GIS infrastructure in public and private organisations alike.

Later in the morning, our CTO Mathias Kuhn gave a compelling talk on Machine Learning and AI in QGIS, showing real-world use cases and technical innovations that bridge geospatial workflows with intelligent automation.

Strengthening QGIS Security

As part of our commitment to sustainability and professionalisation in open source GIS, we are also proud to be a partner of Oslandia in the QGIS Security Project, which Vincent Picavet presented during the event. This initiative aims to ensure that QGIS continues to meet the highest standards of security — a crucial foundation for its growing adoption in critical infrastructures around the world.

Hands-on with QField – in Three Languages!

In the afternoon, OPENGIS.ch hosted a fully booked, multilingual QField workshop, attended by 25 enthusiastic participants. The session provided hands-on experience for users who wanted to take their QGIS projects into the field and was an excellent opportunity to exchange best practices and tips from real-world use cases and get some sun

OPENGIS.ch Tools in Action

Even outside of our sessions, tools developed by OPENGIS.ch were featured prominently throughout the day:

• QField played a key role in the Zermatt use case presentation, demonstrating its flexibility and robustness in alpine field operations.
• The Model Baker plugin, to which we contribute heavily, was showcased with its new multilanguage support for QGIS models — a significant step forward for the Swiss context and its multilingual projects.

A Thriving Community

As always, the QGIS.ch user meeting was a reminder of the strength and passion of the Swiss open source geospatial community. A huge thank you to the organizers, speakers, and participants who made the event such a success — we’re already looking forward to the next one!

Stay connected:
QField website
QFieldCloud
Model Baker plugin

Building on top of the last release which introduced background tracking, this development cycle focused on polishing functionalities and building on top of preexisting features. The variety of improvements is sure to make our diverse user base and community excited to upgrade to QField 3.6.

Main highlights

One of the most noticeable improvement in this version is the addition of “map preview rendering”. QField now renders partial map content immediately beyond the edge of the screen, offering a much nicer experience when panning around as well as zooming in and out. Long-time QGIS users will recognise the behaviour, and we’re delighted to bring this experience to the field

This upgrade was the foundation upon which we built the following enhancement: as of QField 3.6, using the “lock to position” mode now keeps your position at the very center of the screen while the canvas slips through smoothly. This greatly improves the usability of the function as your eyes never need to spend time locating the position within the screen: it’s dead center and it stays there!

Reminder, the “lock to position” mode is activated by clicking on the bottom-right positioning button, with the button’s background turning blue when the mode is activated.

The improvements did not stop there. Panning and zooming around used to drop users out of the lock mode immediately. While this had its upsides, it also meant that simple scale adjustments to try and view more of the map as it follows the position was not possible. With QField 3.6, the lock has been hardened. Moving the map around will temporarily disable the lock, with a visual countdown embedded within a toast message informs users of when the lock will return. An action button to terminate the lock is located within the toaster to permanently leave the mode.

Moving on to QFieldCloud, this cycle saw tons of improvements. To begin with, it is now possible to rely on shared datasets across multiple cloud projects. Known as localised data paths in QGIS, this functionality enables users to reduce storage usage by storing large datasets in QFieldCloud only once, serving multiple cloud projects, and also easing the maintenance of read-only datasets that require regular updates.

QFieldSync users will see a new checkbox when synchronising their projects, letting them upload shared datasets onto QFieldCloud.

Furthermore, QField has introduced a new cloud project details view to provide additional details on QFieldCloud-hosted projects before downloading them to devices. The new view includes a cloud project thumbnail, more space for richer description text, including interactive hyperlinks, and author details, as well as creation and data update timestamps. Finally, the view offers a QR code, which allows users to scan it quickly and access cloud projects, provided they have the necessary access permission. Distributing a public project has never been easier!

Beyond that, tons more has made its way into QField, including map layer notes viewable through a legend badge in the side dashboard, support for feature identification on online raster layers on compatible WMS and ArcGIS REST servers, atlas printing of a relationship’s child feature directly within the parent feature form, and much more. There’s something for everybody out there.

Focus on feature form polishing

This new version of QField coincides with the release of XLSForm Converter, a new QGIS plugin created by OPENGIS.ch’s very own ninjas. As its title implies, the plugin converts an XLSForm spreadsheet file (.xls, .xlsx, .ods) into a full-fledged QGIS project ready to be used in QField with a pre-configured survey layer matching the content of the provided XLSForm.

This was a golden opportunity to focus on polishing QField’s feature form. As a result, advanced functionalities such as data-driven editable flag and label attribute properties are now supported. In addition, tons of paper-cut bugs, visual inconsistencies, and UX shortcomings have been addressed. Our favourite one might just be the ability to drag the feature addition drawer’s header up and down to toggle its full-screen state

Building on top of the last release which introduced background tracking, this development cycle focused on polishing functionalities and building on top of preexisting features. The variety of improvements is sure to make our diverse user base and community excited to upgrade to QField 3.6.

Main highlights

One of the most noticeable improvement in this version is the addition of “map preview rendering”. QField now renders partial map content immediately beyond the edge of the screen, offering a much nicer experience when panning around as well as zooming in and out. Long-time QGIS users will recognise the behaviour, and we’re delighted to bring this experience to the field

This upgrade was the foundation upon which we built the following enhancement: as of QField 3.6, using the “lock to position” mode now keeps your position at the very center of the screen while the canvas slips through smoothly. This greatly improves the usability of the function as your eyes never need to spend time locating the position within the screen: it’s dead center and it stays there!

https://videopress.com/v/kJg69l49?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

Reminder, the “lock to position” mode is activated by clicking on the bottom-right positioning button, with the button’s background turning blue when the mode is activated.

The improvements did not stop there. Panning and zooming around used to drop users out of the lock mode immediately. While this had its upsides, it also meant that simple scale adjustments to try and view more of the map as it follows the position was not possible. With QField 3.6, the lock has been hardened. Moving the map around will temporarily disable the lock, with a visual countdown embedded within a toast message informs users of when the lock will return. An action button to terminate the lock is located within the toaster to permanently leave the mode.

Moving on to QFieldCloud, this cycle saw tons of improvements. To begin with, it is now possible to rely on shared datasets across multiple cloud projects. Known as localised data paths in QGIS, this functionality enables users to reduce storage usage by storing large datasets in QFieldCloud only once, serving multiple cloud projects, and also easing the maintenance of read-only datasets that require regular updates.

QFieldSync users will see a new checkbox when synchronising their projects, letting them upload shared datasets onto QFieldCloud.

Furthermore, QField has introduced a new cloud project details view to provide additional details on QFieldCloud-hosted projects before downloading them to devices. The new view includes a cloud project thumbnail, more space for richer description text, including interactive hyperlinks, and author details, as well as creation and data update timestamps. Finally, the view offers a QR code, which allows users to scan it quickly and access cloud projects, provided they have the necessary access permission. Distributing a public project has never been easier!

Beyond that, tons more has made its way into QField, including map layer notes viewable through a legend badge in the side dashboard, support for feature identification on online raster layers on compatible WMS and ArcGIS REST servers, atlas printing of a relationship’s child feature directly within the parent feature form, and much more. There’s something for everybody out there.

Focus on feature form polishing

This new version of QField coincides with the release of XLSForm Converter, a new QGIS plugin created by OPENGIS.ch’s very own ninjas. As its title implies, the plugin converts an XLSForm spreadsheet file (.xls, .xlsx, .ods) into a full-fledged QGIS project ready to be used in QField with a pre-configured survey layer matching the content of the provided XLSForm.

This was a golden opportunity to focus on polishing QField’s feature form. As a result, advanced functionalities such as data-driven editable flag and label attribute properties are now supported. In addition, tons of paper-cut bugs, visual inconsistencies, and UX shortcomings have been addressed. Our favourite one might just be the ability to drag the feature addition drawer’s header up and down to toggle its full-screen state :)

Today marks the initial release of our brand-new QGIS plugin, XLSForm Converter.
As the name suggests, the plugin converts XLSForm survey files into ready-to-use QGIS projects with a preconfigured survey attribute form.

Migrating to QField was never easier!

Even more exciting is that the converted QGIS project includes all the necessary settings for use with QField, thanks to a nifty QFieldCloud integration. With just a single checkbox, you can upload your generated project to the cloud and begin gathering data—either as a standalone surveyor or collaboratively as part of a team.

We believe this provides a fantastic solution for organisations and groups familiar with XLSForm—or already working with templates—who want to leverage QGIS-powered QField to conduct spatial surveys.

Plugin highlights

The plugin adds an algorithm to QGIS’ processing toolbox that converts a XLSForm file – Microsoft Excel’s .xls or .xlsx as well as LibreOffice Calc’s .ods – into a QGIS project containing a main survey layer and a basemap.

The layer’s geometry type will reflect the first geometry-driven question type found in the XLSForm, namely a point geometry for geopoint, a line geometry for geotrace, or a polygon geometry for geoshape.

For XLSForm repeat blocks, the algorithm generates additional layers and configures parent-child relationships to bind them to the main survey layer. These layers are hidden from the layer tree by default, keeping the project simple and user-friendly—even for users unfamiliar with QGIS.

For questions that capture media content—such as photographs, videos, and audio clips—the converter sets up the project so users can easily record them in QField with a single tap.

Pro tip: Since the converter is an algorithm, you can use it to build complex, model-driven survey projects via the QGIS Processing Modeler. You can also run conversions in headless environments using qgis_process. The possibilities are endless!

QFieldCloud-facilitated deployment to QField

As mentioned earlier, the converted project can immediately be used in QField to conduct surveying. The best way to deploy these projects to your QField-running devices is via QFieldCloud. The algorithm comes with a parameter that – when checked – will automatically upload the generated project to QFieldCloud.

That functionality requires the QFieldSync plugin to be installed and enabled in QGIS. Just log in to your QFieldCloud account via QFieldSync, and let the algorithm take care of the rest. It’s magical! If you haven’t yet tried QFieldCloud, this might be a good time to do so by signing up for a free community account.

Of course, you’ll always be able to copy these projects manually onto devices via USB cable or the numerous file import options available in QField.

XLSForm-what?

XLSForm is a form standard designed to simplify the authoring of forms using spreadsheet programs like LibreOffice Calc or Microsoft Excel. They are simple to get started with and allow for the authoring of complex forms in no time. The syntax is beginner-friendly, and the building of surveys by adding rows onto a spreadsheet is surprisingly intuitive.

The standard has been widely adopted across various sectors, including public health, humanitarian relief, disaster response, local governance, and non-profit organisations.

Over here at OPENGIS.ch, we believe this plugin can be instrumental to preexisting operations and projects interested in migrating to a QField surveying environment where spatial considerations are front and center. If you are interested in discussing this further, do not hesitate to contact us.

🚀 QField has officially hit 1 million downloads – thanks to you! 🎉

Let’s not beat around the bush: QField has hit 1+ million downloads. What started as an ambitious open-source project has transformed into a global tool that’s changing how professionals collect spatial data in the field. This big milestone is the result of years of dedication, with over 50,000 hours invested by our team. Our GeoNinjas contributed 14% of QGIS, while also driving open-source projects like ModelBaker and SwissLocator.Thank you for making GIS nerds the unsung heroes of fieldwork everywhere. Here’s to changing the world, one field at a time!

🚀 GET QFIELD NOW

From Switzerland to the world!🇨🇭

Born in the Swiss Alps, raised by open-source, and now roaming the globe, QField has gone international! What started in Switzerland is now in the hands of field mappers, researchers, and GIS pros on six continents. Thank you for taking QField worldwide! 🌍

Mapping the world one field at a time.

The numbers tell a story 📖

One million downloads might sound like just a number, but for us, it represents something much bigger. It’s 1'000'000 times someone chose an innovative, flexible mobile mapping solution. It’s 1’000’000 instances of fieldwork made easier, more efficient, and more accurate.

From humble beginnings to over 1 million downloads, QField has officially gone from “little app that could” to “open-source overachiever. ” Thanks to the power of open source (and probably some caffeine).

QField has hit 1 million downloads in over 150 countries.

QField’s top user countries 🏆

QField’s passport is full! 🌍 We’re blown away by how far our geospatial tool has travelled: from mountaintops to city blocks, you’re mapping it all. Our amazing global user community is making QField a true #DigitalPublicGood.A map made in heaven! 💚

Mapping knows no borders, just like QField’s growing community.

More than just an app 📱

This cross-platform flexibility helps professionals collect GIS data anywhere, anytime. QField goes wherever you do. Android? Check. iOS? Check. Desktop? Check. If it has a screen, we’re probably on it. Collect GIS data anywhere, anytime.

QField isn’t just software, it’s a community-driven project that turns complex geospatial challenges into precise, actionable data. Every download represents a connection to our core mission: making professional-grade mobile GIS accessible, reliable, and straightforward.

QField’s Journey: Mapping our milestones 📍

Our roadmap is packed with milestones and highlights that will continue to push the boundaries of mobile GIS.

QField toQFieldCloud ☁️

You can play a key role in the sustainable growth of QField, the open-source digital good. Your support  can take many forms, like contributing… or:

This not only streamlines and enhances your fieldwork but also gives you access to the full QField ecosystem with all its advantages. At the same time, you directly contribute to the continuous improvement of QField, ensuring its impact grows for everyone.

💚 SUPPORT US