[Qgis-user] Offline background map for large regions

[Greg Troxel]

Andreas via Qgis-user <qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org> writes:

> Currently I have an older core i7 with 8 GB RAM running QGIS Desktop
> 3.10 on Linux Mint 20.3, which I know is already obsolete but it's in
> the repositories of this most recent Linux Mint LTS version, and I need
> a stable system that does not break due to a library update etc.

For reference I'm using a 2014 desktop, i7, 24G of RAM, qgis 3.22.8.
Your hardware seems ok, but probably you can find a way to have 3.22 as
a build independent from your out-of-date base system.

> [wanting to have basemap for a very large area available offline]

A few points:

  - Tile services generally have usage rules, especially free ones.
    Bulk downloading from openstreetmap.org is considered abuse, so
    don't try that.

  - Pre-downloading tiles is not going to work for continent-scale
    basemap.  So you should be looking at vector data.

  - Licensing is an issue for most sources other then openstreetmap
    (besides some national-scale data in some countries).

Therefore, you should be looking at OSM vector data.


I have set this up in a way that will work offline (although that wasn't
my intent):

  - osm file from geofabrik as pbf
  - postgis/postgresql
  - osm2pgsql toload
  - A style to render the map:
      https://github.com/yannos/Beautiful_OSM_in_QGIS/

This works well enough.  I did it so I could add things not in mapnik,
and eventually I want to adjust rendering of many things, to produce
printed maps of conservation areas.  But it works offline.  It was not
really that hard, if you are used to postgresql.


A completely different approach is to set up mapnik to render tiles on
your laptop, with the same datain postgis (perhaps in the same form,
perhaps not) and running tile generation as you need it.  From the qgis
perspective the map is online but the other half is on your computer so
no network required.



-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 194 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-user/attachments/20220710/a0937881/attachment.sig>