GIS Learn

QuickOSM is a QGIS plugin designed to make it easy to download and integrate OpenStreetMap data. It utilizes the Overpass API for querying. As you probably already know, OSM is an invaluable resource for GIS tasks thanks to its vast repository of user-contributed mapping data. It includes features like streets, buildings, administrative boundaries etc. In this blog post, I will try to demonstrate how to download it based on the specified criteria, using QuickOSM plugin in QGIS.

First, we need to install it. We go to the Plugins menu and find the plugin.

After you download it, you can directly access it via the “Vector” option in the top menu.

You can see the menu down below. There are several options here, but we select the “Quick Query” option to type our query.

We first select the keyword. I want to see “industrial” areas. After selecting “industrial” in the ‘Key’ section, I can query on a specific value. If I don’t select any value, it will query on all values.

If we want, we can type multiple queries, but as I observed, it can give wrong results.

Right below, I select a place to get the industrial areas. I want to see industrial areas in London, so I type the name there.

By clicking the “Advanced” option down below, we can define what type of data we want to see, in which format we want to save the data, and where we want to save it. I want to see polygons only. And I don’t want to save it now. Thus, I cannot change the format for now.

When we click on “Run query” it will automatically download the features that suit the criteria we have defined. When it is completed, you can see the downloaded layer(s) in the layer window.

It seems that there is only one polygon that suits the criteria I have defined. It, of course, may change depending on your specific criteria.

You can play with this tool and see how easy it is to download OpenStreetMap data directly in QGIS.