Layer Properties
In your Layers Panel, zoom to the parks data you downloaded yourself. The workshop material will use Vancouver parks for demonstration.
If your parks are far away from Vancouver, you might encounter some distortion of the basemap due to the project projection being ill-suited for your area of interest. That’s okay. You can also play around with changing the project projection (from the status bar) to something that works for the whole world (and thus the basemap), such as WGS_1984_Web_Mercator_Auxiliary_Sphere.
Now, control-click (right-click) your parks layer again but this time open its Properties.
While today’s workshop won’t explore Layer Properties in detail, it’s important to know how to access the Vector Properties Dialogue.
Information and Source will contain metadata for the layer, including the dataset’s Coordinate Reference System (CRS). Joins is useful if, for example, you wanted to load a csv file to your QGIS project with additional descriptive data for parks but no geospatial coordinates.
Symbology
Symbology is where you can change how your layer is symbolized and rendered. Currently, the symbology for parks is set to Single Symbol meaning every park is symbolized the same.
To Do
Try changing the symbolization of all parks by clicking the color bar and choosing a different color from the dialogue box that opens. Click Apply in the lower left-hand corner of the Layers Properties dialogue window to see the color update on your Map Canvas. When you are content with your changes, click OK.
Note that you can also access a layer’s symbology from the Layers Panel by selecting the layer and then clicking the symbology icon
in the Layers Panel, or by just clicking the little symbol next to a layer.
After adjusting your symbology, SAVE your project.
Labels
Labels will assign labels to your features based on an attribute value.
To Do
Add labels for the names of parks to your map.
From the Labels layer property, change
No LabelstoSingle Labels.
Then assign the value to that which most plausibly contains the parks’ names.
Click Apply and check your map canvas. This might be overwhelming. Change the labelling of parks back to
No Labels.
Resources for further exploration
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