
- OPEN ARCGIS FILE IN QGIS FOR FREE
- OPEN ARCGIS FILE IN QGIS HOW TO
- OPEN ARCGIS FILE IN QGIS INSTALL
- OPEN ARCGIS FILE IN QGIS PRO
Many of the files appear twice: files with an “a” suffix represent polygons (areas) while files without that suffix are points or lines. It contains a number of individual shapefiles classified by type of feature: buildings, land use, natural, places, places of worship (pofw), points of interest (pois), railways, roads, traffic, transport, water, and waterways. I downloaded and unzipped the file for Rhode Island. …to access files for states / provinces / admin divisions

No luck for California (too big), but the rest of states are small enough that you can get shapefiles for all of them. Click on US, and you’re presented with files for each of the states. You can get shapefiles for Greenland and Mexico, but not Canada or the US as the files are still too big. For instance, on Geofabrik’s download page if you click on North America you’re presented with country extracts for that continent (see images below). Even if you downloaded the osm pbf files and added them to QGIS, the software will struggle to render something that big.īut all is not lost Geofabrik and many other providers package data in a shapefile format for smaller areas, provided that the size and number of features is not too great. These are enormous files, and as such they are only provided in the osm pbf format as shapefiles can’t effectively handle data that size. On their main page they list files that contain all features for each of the continents. They package OSM data by geographic area and feature type. I started with Geofabrik in Germany, as it was a source I recognized.
OPEN ARCGIS FILE IN QGIS INSTALL
You have to download and install a special Data Interoperability extension, which is an esoteric thing that’s not part of the standard package and requires a special license from your site license coordinator.Ī better and more targeted approach is to download pre-created extracts that are provided by a number of organizations listed in the OSM wiki. QGIS is able to handle these files directly you just add them as a vector layer. pbf is a compressed binary version of the osm. The “native” file format of OSM is the osm / pbf format. This is a pretty blunt approach, as you have to be zoomed in pretty close and you grab every possible feature in the view.

The most straightforward method would be to export data directly from the main OSM page by zooming into an area and hitting the Export button. In this post I’ll cover three approaches for achieving this in ArcGIS Pro, with references to QGIS. I’m looking for straightforward solutions that I could use for answering questions from students (so no command line tricks or database stuff).
OPEN ARCGIS FILE IN QGIS PRO
I’ve been using ArcGIS Pro more extensively in my new job and was wondering how I could do the same thing: query features from the OSM based on keys and values (denoting feature type) and geographic area and extract them as a vector layer.
OPEN ARCGIS FILE IN QGIS FOR FREE
The OSM is a great source for free and open GIS data, especially for types of features that are not captured in government sources, and for parts of the world that don’t possess a free or robust GIS data infrastructure.
OPEN ARCGIS FILE IN QGIS HOW TO
A couple years ago I wrote a post that demonstrated how to use the QuickOSM plugin for QGIS to easily extract features from the OpenStreetMap (OSM).
