Before and after the field

Homestead started out as the desk between the field and the office. This page is the round trip: what to get ready for the phone before a survey, and what to do with the survey once it comes home. None of it is required to use Tavak. It just makes the day easier.

Before: a basemap for the phone

Tavak draws its own imagery offline out of an MBTiles pack. Here is how to make one from an orthophoto or a scanned map:

  1. Add › Raster… with the GeoTIFF, and let the pyramid build so that you can see what you have.
  2. Open Clip and export and draw a rectangle round the survey area, or load the block polygons from a file.
  3. On the MBTiles tab, choose where to save it, leave the format on WebP, check the zoom range, whose maximum is the raster's native zoom, and press Clip and export MBTiles.
  4. Copy the file to the phone and import it from Tavak's Library, under Add Dataset › Raster. Tavak's Basemaps & Offline Maps takes it from there.

Before: reference layers for the phone

The plot boundaries, the road network, last year's points. Add them as vector layers and style them if you like, though only the data travels, since Tavak does its own styling. Leave visible the ones you want to take, then use the GeoPackage tab to export them cut to the same shape. On the phone, import the GeoPackage as a vector dataset, under Add Dataset › Vector. Clip and export has the details.

After: the survey on the desk

  1. Export a backup from Tavak's Surveys tab (Export & QGIS) and bring the ZIP to the computer.
  2. Add › Survey… with the ZIP. The map fits itself to it, and the tree, the ribbon and the dock fill up.
  3. Replay the day; check the forms in the Table, the photos in Media, the positions on the map with the identify popover.
  4. Hand over the PDF report, or take the GeoPackage on somewhere else. The Files tab shows where it sits inside the ZIP, and QGIS opens it as it stands.

Open several surveys together and you can compare a week's work: each one in the tree, the active one on the ribbon and in the dock, and all of them on the map at once. Save the whole desk as a project if you want to come back to it.

Questions? support@spatialize.dev · Homestead home · Download · Tavak documentation