 Hello, welcome back on my YouTube channel. In my last video, I've demonstrated how to create wedge buffers using pictures taken with merging maps in the field. This can, however, also be done on the fly and also in such a way that you can see the wedge buffers in merging maps on the mobile phone app. I'll demonstrate that in this video. Let's first install the merging plugin from the Plugins Manager. After installing the plugin, you can find it in the browser panel. Click right and choose configure. There enter the credentials of your account. Click test connection to see if your credentials are okay. You can also save the credentials to your QGIS password manager. After logging in, I have access to the projects on the merging maps cloud. Under explore, I can find the public projects and the developers of merging maps have a very nice example project for reading exit data from cameras that we need in our project. So click right and choose clone to add this to my own account and then I can find this project in the browser panel under my projects. Then I can choose download to use it locally and I can open the project. I'm going to use the app in a different area on our modern island in the Netherlands called Ameland where I'm going tomorrow. So I'm using the locator bar to locate Ameland and I find it here and I'm going to use the extent of the island of the map canvas for our project in the app. So go to the project menu and in the project properties, first you can check the settings under merging maps and adjust it to your needs. You can enable here selective sync. You can change the quality of the photos that are stored in the project or snapping options. Here I keep everything as default. Under view settings, you can set the extent of the project that will be taken over by the app. I choose here the map canvas extent, but I noticed that my project is still in EPSG 3857 while I prefer to have my project in the Dutch projection. So I'm going to change the projection of the project. I use 28992 and I set the on the fly reprojection to Amersfoort new. Just to be sure I'm going to set the extent to these new coordinates in the project projection. Note that the coordinates taken with the merging maps app are in a latitude longitude geographic coordinate system, but when we load the project it will be on the fly reprojected to the projection of this project. The cloned project comes with a backdrop of OpenStreetMap, but I would also like to demonstrate how to add another backdrop and I'm going to use here the PDOC services plugin, which is a plugin to access Dutch GIS layers and it adds this button and there I can find an actual aerial photograph or the photo with 8 centimeter resolution in WMS format. So I'm adding this to the project and let's zoom in so you can see the details. So in the field I have an internet connection so I can use this layer. Let's change the order of the layers and I'm going to make map themes, presets of layers that I want to show. So I'm going to add a theme where I just have the survey layer which is called data and the aerial photograph layer and I call this map theme aerial photograph. They create another map theme with the survey layer and OpenStreetMap and I call that one OpenStreetMap. Now you'll see later that merging maps on the mobile phone will take over these map themes so we can switch between the two easily. You can also do that in your QGIS project as I demonstrate here. So let's now check the attribute table to see which fields come in this clone project. We see that this has FID, the picture path and some of this EXIF data that we need. To see how this works we have to look at the layer properties attribute forms and there we can see how this has been set up. In the form layout there's the FID field, there's the photo field and let's change it to an image viewer so we can also see an example of the image in the attribute table form view later. There's direction, you see it's a range widget type with a slider and it uses here a function to read the EXIF direction data from the picture. The same is for latitude and longitude coordinates, they also use these functions to read the coordinates from the picture, from the EXIF information, the metadata of the picture and there are similar fields to get direction, latitude and longitude and the date from the GPS. I'm going to demonstrate if you want to add another field for example to take some notes with the picture. So I toggle to editing mode and I add a new field, I call it notes and I change it to text type and to give the amount of characters let's change it to 100 and the toggle of editing and save the new field then I go back to the layer properties and I'm going to add the notes field to the form layout by dragging it there and I can put it in the position where I want it but I want it at the bottom and I choose a multiline text widget so we can take enough notes if necessary and I can give an alias for the fields so I can call the FID the observation number. The app will show the alias. Now we need to create a nice style for these data survey points so I toggle on the layer styling panel and what we're going to do is create a symbol, an SVG marker for the camera and to use the rotation and a wedge buffer by using a geometry generator. So let's first choose the SVG marker and when we want to use SVG markers in merchant maps we need to store the SVG in the project folder. So I'm going to browse to the folder of these SVG files that come with QGIS and there's one called camera.svg and I'm going to copy this one and paste it in the folder of this project so it will be later synchronized with the cloud therefore it's important that you really have the SVG file in the folder. Let's make it a bit bigger, you can later tweak it. Now let's change the color of the SVG marker and let's use this color and I would like to have the symbol rotated with the direction field. I'm going to use here the numeric direction field. I'm going to add an extra style layer and then move it to the bottom then I'm going to use a geometry generator for that layer and that is what our polygon with the wedge buffer will be and I'm going to write an expression. I'm going to search for wedge buffer which is a function and here in the right panel you can find an explanation it needs center azimuth width outer radius so let's formulate our expression center should be equal to the geometry so the the point you see an example then azimuth that's the angle for the middle of the wedge to the point and I'm going to use there the direction then there's the width make that 45 degrees and set the outer radius to 0.0008 degrees click okay and now I'm going to change the simple fill here to a shape burst fill and I'm going to use two colors with some opacity so can we still see what's below and from that reddish kind of color to white which is completely transparent change to set distance and modify the blur strength we can play with this when we see the results so I'm going to just add a point to see how it's now going to look like and there I can use the direction slider to set the direction there I see the rotated camera and the wetroom buffer that looks already quite nice so you can play with the variables to change the looks so toggle off editing and choose this card to remove also our example point we'll save the project and click synchronize and then it shows me the changes and obviously our online layers are not synchronized but they're just loaded on the mobile phone so here I go to the mobile phone to merge in maps and under projects I find their amulant and I synchronize and then I go to the home screen and I can load the project there I can see it and let's first test those map themes so I can choose here between the aerial photograph and open street map and when I zoom in it shows me all the details from the online layer now I'm going to add a point of course this is demonstration just from inside and this how the field form looks like I want to take a picture here just of my screen click okay and you see it fills in all this active data I can make some notes here it warns me that I still need to fill in something and that is this observation number auto generate does not work here so I need to fill in a number otherwise it doesn't accept it and here on the fly it shows me the direction of the picture of course not very accurate because I'm inside but this is exactly what I wanted to achieve so I can now synchronize it back with the cloud so we can also see this observation in QGIS QGIS I click on the synchronize button it shows me the differences and it will download the observation point now I'll find it in the attribute table so I go to the form view I can see there the field form with also the preview of the picture but I need to tweak a little bit the widgets I see here the file name that's not so nice to see and all this active data is also not so interesting and let's have a look here at the point on how it looks like in QGIS this point move the selection and I zoom in I see there the watch buffer so I'm gonna remove a few of the fields that I don't want to show to the user in the form it will be stored in attribute table but not as a form view let's have a look at our form and I would still like to tweak it I'm going to add a new field because I also want to have the date in a readable form stored I can also choose date and time with here I'll choose only date and I would like to get rid of the file name so I go here after saving and I add the date by dragging it to the position where I want it so after the picture and for the picture I don't want to show the path I'm going to uncheck this box for the date I see it's already in the day month year format so I keep it like that and for the default I use $ now to show the current date and every time observation is updated it will also update the current date I give an alias date and I'm giving here the aliases in the same capital first character and I'm going to change here in the layer settings the display so that will control how we will see a preview in the app so what I would like to see is the observation number and date and a preview of the picture so I can control that with an expression I add here a string observation number and I concatenate that with the field fid then I concatenate it with new line then on the second line I would like to see the date so I use a string date and I concatenate that with the date field and then to create that picture I need to create an expression here if you use hash image it knows it has to show the image and then you need to tell where the image is stored and it starts with a file, column and tree slashes and then it needs to know the folder and that's a variable so I can click here on expression and then under variables I can find their project folder and I can click insert to add it there to the file name and to complete the path I also need the name of the file of the image which is stored in the image field so their fields and values I can find there the photo field which has the path of the picture as you can see there in the example and I also insert this expression so we now have the path to the folder in the file name of the picture I can save the project and synchronize it and here on the mobile phone app I can also synchronize and I'll add a new point it warns that the gps accuracy is low but it's just to demonstrate point number two take a picture and it shows the direction coordinates and it can take notes and it hides all the other fields and there I see the watch buffer now to show what this preview does when I click on it it shows the picture but we have added a few fields so I can better choose the new point and there you see observation number and the date and the little picture let's synchronize and see how this looks like in QGIS we synchronize it there and there's our second point in the attribute table I can see there all the fields you see for the new point that it also shows the observation number and date expression now I'm going to remove the two points because those were examples I save it attribute tables empty and I synchronize and then tomorrow I can use it on my mobile phone to map pictures that it take in Ambulant and after the weekend I can see the results here