 And welcome back on my YouTube channel. In today's video I'm going to show you a nice new feature of Merging Maps, which is called Position Tracking. With this feature, users can record their movement history while surveying. The feature works on both Android and iOS devices, even when the app is in the background. We'll start from scratch with installing the Merging Maps plugin. Go to the Plugins Manager and search for Merging. Click Install. Now you'll find Merging Maps in the browser panel. Click Right to configure. Use your credentials to login. Press your connection and when it says OK, you can save the credentials and click OK. Now you have access to your projects and can create new ones. Click the plus sign to add a new basic QJS project. You can choose your workspace and give the project a name. Here I call it ForestWalk and I create it in the default location. You can also choose to make the project public, so others can download your project too. It fetches the data from the Merging Cloud service and we are ready to start with our basic project. In the Layers panel, you can see that our basic project consists of a point layer called Survey, which is for storing our point observations, and a backdrop layer called OpenMapTilesOSM, which is a vector tile layer from OpenStreetMap. The first thing that we need to do is to zoom into our Survey study area, and then we go to the Project Properties to do some settings. Go to the View Settings tab, and there you can set the project full extent, which should be the map canvas extent. In this way, we limit the app to the extent of our map canvas. Let's go to the Merging Maps Settings tab. Here I'm going to focus on the Position Tracking, and under Position Tracking, you can enable the Position Tracking, and you can choose between Best for the best available accuracy, but that will cause a high battery use, because it collects more than one update per minute. If you set it to Normal, you optimize it for battery life, and you have one update per minute or 100 meter traveled, and with Low you can have a higher battery life. You could enable snapping, but in my case I will probably go sometimes off track, so I keep the default settings for snapping, which means no snapping. Now you can see that in the Layers panel, the Tracking layer is added, which is a line string layer. If I open the Attribute table, I can see attributes like start and end time, and the user that collects the data, as well as the distance. So now we're ready to synchronize this project with the cloud. If I click the Synchronize button, it will prompt me that I have to save the changes to the project, so let's do that first, and then you'll get the pop-up for the synchronization and click the Sync button. Now your project has been successfully synchronized with the Merging Cloud. We're ready to go into the field. Now go to Merging Maps on your mobile device. I assume that you've already logged in. There go to the Projects tab and find the project, tap the Download button, and then go to the Home screen. There you can tap on the name of the project, and then it will open. So I'm now in the field to see that we've installed Merging Maps on the phone, and what I'm going to do now is make a nice tour around this link. This is the account plus, account post in RottenApp, and while I'm doing that, I'm going to move my position, and I'm going to take some pictures. So let's go. You start position tracking, tap More, position tracking, and then tap Start Tracking. Now you can see at the top of the screen that position tracking is running. There's one more useful setting, so go to More and Settings, and then switch to Follow GPS with Map. I see beautiful rainbow, so let's add a record. Tap Record, Add, tap the calendar to add a date, and take the picture, and then save the observation. Well, let's get going and see how our position tracking is working, and every time you encounter something interesting, I'll add a picture. So here we have one of the windmills at the lake, and we continue with a view on the two windmills, Stair and Lady, and then there's another nice monument here of the Holland Pop Festival of 1970, which was a woodstock of the Netherlands. Now I'm going to test what's going to happen if I multitask on my mobile phone. During my walk, I want to make some video clips, and I'm just going to see if Merging Maps is still continuing in the background with logging my route. After recording a short clip, I go back to the Merging Maps app, and there I see that I have lost fix of the GPS while I was filming, and therefore I need to stop tracking and start it again, and I have encountered this with several tests, so on my Android device, probably the background logging of the tracks doesn't work well. Let's continue our route, make some nice shots on the route. I'm at the end of the route, at the little sluice, and I'm going to synchronize this project so I can use it back in the office in QGIS. In the office, in the Merging Maps toolbar, click the arrow button to synchronize, and here you see which files will be synchronized, which includes a lot of pictures. When the project is downloaded and synchronized, you can see this pop-up, and then the layers will appear. Let's first have a look at the survey layer. These are the red points, where I took pictures, so I click right and open the attribute table. When I switch it to form view, I will see their pictures and the date and time. Let's now also have a look at the tracking layer, click right, open attribute table. You could toggle to the attribute view to see the attribute, but it also works nicely in the form view, and there we see the tracking start time and time total distance and tracked by which user, and every time I did a segment, start, stop, it creates a separate feature. As you can see, there's an outlier on our line for the position logging, and this can be caused because the GPS reading was wrong, I lost fix, maybe by multitasking on my phone, so I'm going to correct it, select the line segment to see where it is, and then I can use the vertex tool and click on the vertex. I could move it in the correct position, or I could just delete it by using the delete button, and I can toggle editing to save the edits. When you later synchronize back with the merging cloud, then also this will be updated when you synchronize it back on your phone. You could do a lot more styling, but now it looks nicer if I have my server layer above the tracking, but I'm going to style the points with the pictures that were taken at the point, so I go to the layer styling panel, I select simple marker and I change it to raster image marker, and instead of choosing a file here, I want to of course link it to the pictures that were taken, and I can do that by data defined override, and there I can make an expression, and to go to variables, and there I need project home variable, which is the home folder of a project, and you see there the current value, that's correct, and then I need to formulate the path by adding some strings, and I need to have a backslash, but the backslash is an escape character, so I use two, and then I also add there the field with the file name of the photo, so here in the preview you can then see that that is now correctly formulated, and the pictures are loaded, they're a bit small, so I make them larger, and it works better if I use here map units, because then the pictures will scale with the map, instead of having a constant size, and then I can have a look and visit back the places. I hope you've enjoyed the video, please subscribe to my YouTube channel if you want to see more updates, looking forward to see you again.