Hello everyone, welcome to my QGIS tutorial. On this article, I am going to focus on “layers” in QGIS. This is the most frequent menu that you will access when using QGIS. The term “layer” in QGIS is pretty much similar to the “layer” in other GIS software such as Mapinfo. Its a stackable set of features that can be displayed in QGIS map window. QGIS supports several types of layer. You can add Shapefile, Mapinfo Table, WMTS and other online data layers and many more.
Create New Layer in QGIS
When you don’t have any data/layer in your project, you can create a new one. There are 4 types of layers you can create directly from QGIS window.
- Geopackage layer
- Shapefile layer
- Spatialite layer
- Temporary scratch layer
From its name, its pretty self explainable. In most cases, I only uses the shapefile layer for better interoperability with other GIS software such as Mapinfo and ArcGIS. To create a new shapefile layer, follow these steps.
Create New Geopackage Layer
Geopackage is a special package for QGIS. In most cases, I prefer to use this format for better file management in QGIS. But, this format is not supported by other GIS software such as Mapinfo.
Create New Shapefile layer
In the video above, you will aso see how to digitize a new polygon on a shapefile layer. But we will discuss about this in details in the next tutorials.