[Qgis-user] Report Layout strange behaviour with photos

Tue Sep 15 02:34:40 PDT 2020

Hi Bernd, 

The best intro to QGIS reports (that I know) can be found at Nyall
Dawsons website:
https://north-road.com/2018/01/23/exploring-reports-in-qgis-3-0-the-ultimate-guide/

Nyall is also the developer who worked on the reports. 

The reports in QGIS did not get a lot of attention yet - Tim Sutton
presented reports and his reults at FOSS4G in Bucharest - and like you,
he ran into a lot of limitations and hidden things you need to do with
expressions and such. There is definitely room for improvements. 

Collecting feature requests at Github is great, but it would be very
good to collect (reference) all of these in a QGIS QEP and then we could
find a dev (most likely Nyall) and come up with funding. I am pretty
sure that Tim Sutton would join your effort - and myself as well ;-) If
this effort is backed by a convincing collection of useful improvements,
I am confident that we can find organizations funding it. 

We could also schedule a meeting with Tim, Nyall and yourself - and
other interested users to discuss further improvements. But collecting
missing things upfront to such a meeting would make the discussion much
more productive. 

Hope this helps, 

Andreas 

On 2020-09-15 11:17, Bernd Vogelgesang wrote:

> Hi Andreas,
> 
> hope I did not sound too negative. For sure I would like to help in some
> way. I give money in nearly every crowdfunding project, though I even
> don't need most functionalities there.
> Around the report function, there is quite a sounding silence in the
> lists and the web, so I assume that few people use it, or feel too
> stupid to ask cause they don't get it to work properly.
> 
> What I already tried, was to collect issues on github for the Report 
> But already there the problems begin: There is not a label for it (only
> a general "Print Layout") and report is a very common word)
> This may be intended as the reporting seems to be the younger brother of
> the Atlas, but makes it not easier ;)
> 
> Before I would be able to create a QEP, I would need someone to explain
> me the parts in Report that I maybe simply do not understand.
> 
> So, count me in (at least a bit ;) )
> 
> Bernd
> 
> On 15.09.20 08:30, Andreas Neumann wrote: Hi Bernd,
> The report functionality definitely needs some love. There is a great
> base now, but it needs to improve.
> Would you volunteer to collect missing things regarding reports in a QEP
> and then help organize a crowd-funding? Even if you can't fund this
> yourself, it would help a lot to come up with a sound proposal /
> specification, that some interested developer can submit a quote and we
> can look around for funders.
> There are quite a few successful examples in the past where someone who
> missed a functionality in QGIS but couln't finance it came up with a
> sound proposal and then we could find a developer and funders based on
> that initiative.
> Or you could organize this as a joint effort - e.g. through the german
> QGIS user group.
> Greetings,
> Andreas
> On 2020-09-14 23:09, Bernd Vogelgesang wrote:
> 
> On 14.09.20 22:30, Håvard Tveite wrote: Including photos / images in reports is covered by the documentation.
> 
> See:
> https://docs.qgis.org/testing/en/docs/user_manual/print_composer/create_reports.html#including-pictures-in-a-report
> 
> It worked for me.
> It should now also be possible to use images stored in a BLOB field.
> 
> Håvard 
> Thanx for answering. Indeed there is something about adding photos, but
> actually this version of the doc is somehow not showing up in google
> searches:
> 
> Furthermore, I did not have the problem of having to construct a path to
> the image. The full path is already in the data (from the nice toolbox
> function for geotagged images). The report just did't eat the path.
> After dozend and dozends of attemps, QGIS somehow seemed to give up on
> refusing them, and now miraculously is accepting the path.
> 
> The problem, that all images where repeatedly showing in all section got
> solved too. In the level up for the subplots, I had to use the field
> unique for each subplot and not that for the plot, as I wrongly assumed.
> Having it set wrongly didn't influence the correct print of the plots
> and then their subplots, but had influence on the follwing photos. Pfuh,
> the logic behind, how the report "knows "what to print in lower levels
> is actually not really obvious, It seems to figure this out on its own.
> 
> So, seems I get it working.
> 
> Major flaws:
> There is only the possibility to select an existing field for a layer in
> report groups. So the data has to be prepared for each and every
> possible usage beforehand. Having the possibilty to use expressions here
> would be phantastic. So now, when you find out that you had not the
> right variables for your job in the data, you have to stop working on
> the report and fumble the stuff into the attributes. I worked around
> this problem by setting up a nice model to prepare my data, but not
> everyone has the knowledge to do so.
> 
> Found no way to add sections within the "tree" or to move anything. Once
> you laid out a design and forgot a title page or mid-sections, you seem
> to have to restart from scratch. No way to manipulate it later.
> 
> Found no way so far to add page numbers.
> 
> All in all. Spent 2 days now on this 30 page report and I hope I will
> remember next time how to glue things together.
> This could be a really powerful tool for lazy people having to do boring
> reports frequently. So far, no time was gained, and I had to use extra
> doses of alcohol not to give up.;)
> Hopefully developers will give it a little more love some day to make it
> a bit smoother, then it will really rock!
> 
> On 14.09.2020 18:20, Bernd Vogelgesang wrote: Hi there,
> 
> I'm really eager to finally figure out how to create a photo
> documentation with QGIS.
> 
> Everything needed is prepared and in place. I have overview coverages of
> plots with sub-plot over an aerial image. The maps are nicely produced
> to a report as groups. On each overview, the belonging sub-plots follow
> as individual maps.
> 
> Now I would like to show pictures taken on the sub-plots.
> 
> First issue: I add a new group photo-points and as field I select the
> referencing field for the sub-plot. Edit body, add picture frame. When
> setting the full file path for the images (stored as field "photo" in
> the point file, generated with "Import geotagged photos") there is only
> a red cross shown, and the selection in the dialog jumps from raster to
> svg. On export as pdf, there is a warning "Picture source is missing or
> corrupt".
> 
> I redid this several times, to no avail, but once in a sudden, a preview
> image was shown, though I did not change the slightest thing in the
> settings. I swear!
> 
> Second issue: Now that it finally accepted the path, exporting the
> report now produced a page for each picture under each sub-plot, instead
> of filtering those which actually fit there (and how it does with the
> sub-plots within the plots!)
> 
> Has anyone an idea what might be wrong here. Documentation on this
> matter or examples are unfortunatly nonexistent.
> 
> Linux Mint, 3.14.1
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Bernd
> 
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