Anyone working with geospatial data, had probably encountered at some point the need for geocoding. The task of transforming an address (e.g.: a placename, city, postcode) into a pair of coordinates (e.g.: a point geometry) is called forward geocoding, while the task of transforming a pair of coordinates into an address is called reverse geocoding.
As of today, there is some support to geocoding in QGIS, using third-party geocoding APIs. A geocoding API is a service which receives as an input an address or a pair of coordinates and returns a point or an address as result. There are many commercial geocoding APIs on the market (including the well-known Google Maps API) and there is one free API (Nominatum) which relies on OSM data. There is no silver bullet in what concerns geocoding, and you should evaluate carefully the option that best suits your use case.
The table bellow shows different QGIS plugins which support geocoding . Some of them are focused on geocoding, while others do a bunch of other things.
| Plugin | Downloads | Last Release | Forward | Reverse | API Key | Focus on geocoding | Geocoding API |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MMQGIS | 157418 | 2021 | y | y | n | n | Google/OSM/… |
| GeoCoding | 146960 | 2018 | y | y | y | y | OSM, Google |
| GoogleMaps | 52717 | 2021 | y | n | y | y | |
| Maptiler | 15696 | 2022 | y | n | y | n | Maptiler |
| Nominatim LF | 9883 | 2021 | y | y | n | y | OSM |
| TravelTime | 7460 | 2023 | y | y | y | n | TravelTime |
| TomTom | 1450 | 2020 | y | n | y | y | TomTom |
After reviewing these plugins, it became clear that there would be space for one plugin which would address the following items:
- Bulk processing: Although in some occasions it may be useful to geocode a single instance, this is rarely the case in GIS projects. Moreover, this functionality can be accomplished by an online tool or even using the bulk processing. This line of thought renders the location filter less interesting than a bulking tool.
- Responsive and performant: Some of the existing geocoding tools are unresponsive while handling a large number of rows. The ability to perform batch (e.g.: asynchronous) geocoding can address some of these issues.
- Forward/reverse geocoding: Forward geocoding is disproportionately more implemented than reverse geocoding. This could be due to market demand, but also to technological reasons (e.g.: reverse geocoding is not implemented in the QGIS core). Still, if there is not too much effort, it could be nice to offer reverse geocoding to users, even if it is just for a few use cases.
- Support to options: It would be nice to offer some of the options offered by the API, through the plugin. These could include the restriction to a country (or bounding box) and the ability to control the output fields.
- Help/Documentation: A lot of the existing plugins have UIs which are not intuitive and do not offer any useful help/documentation. This makes using the plugins (or even finding them) very challenging. Even some resources like a tutorial or a README page on GitHub which could be referenced from the plugin, could improve this situation.
- Intuitive UI: One of the problems with QGIS plugins is the lack of standardisation of the UI. Some plugins add icons on the toolbar, others add entries in the plugins menu or even in other menus. Some plugins add all of these things, and instead of one widget, they add multiple widgets. This renders the task of finding, setting up and using the plugin sometimes very complicated. One way of overcoming this, is to use the processing UI, which is more or less standard. Although the menu entries can be configured, the look & feel is always the same, and the plugin can always be found through the processing toolbox.
The OpenCage Geocoding plugin is a processing plugin that offers forward and reverse geocoding within QGIS. Being a processing plugin, it benefits from many features out-of-the -box, such as batch/asynchronous processing, integration with the modeller or the ability to run on the python console. It also features a standard UI, with inputs, outputs, options and feedback which should be familiar to processing users.
This plugin relies on the OpenCage geocoding API, and API that offers geocoding worldwide based on different datasets. While OpenCage makes extensive use of Nominatum, it is worth to mention that they do contribute to back to the project, both in terms of funding and of actual code.
Being a commercial API, you will need to sign-up for a key before using this plugin. You can check the different plans on their website. If you choose a trial key, you can sign-up without the need of using a credit card, which is not always the case with other providers.
Although the plugin can be run with minimal configuration using the default options, the configuration parameters leverage the capabilities of the underlying API to generate results that best fit our use case. For instance if you want to geocode addresses and you know that your addresses are all within a given region, you can feed the algorithm with a country name or even a bounding box. This bounding box can be hardcoded, but it can also be calculated from the layer extent, canvas extend or even drawn by hand.
Apart from the formatted address and the coordinates, optionally the algorithm can also return additional structured information about the location in the results. This includes for instance the timezone, the flag of the country and the currency (you can read here what are the different annotations that the API returns). As this may slow down the response, it is switched off by default, to ensure people only request it if they are really interested on this feature.
Whether you want to geocode addresses or coordinates, you may want the resulting address to be in a specific language. If you set the language parameter, the API will do the best effort to return results in that language.
I hope this plugin can be useful to users with different degrees of expertise: from the simplest use case, to the more advanced ones (through the options). Overall, the merits of this plugin are largely due to the capabilities of the processing toolbox and of the OpenCage API.
If you find any issues, please report them in the issue tracker of the project. This plugin is released under GPLV2. Feel free to fork it, look at the code and modify it for other use cases. If you feel like contributing back to the project, Pull Requests are also welcome (:
Happy geocoding!
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