settings – QGIS Tips

Absolute vs relative paths in QGIS projects

August 29, 2025 by Michel Stuyts

The choice between absolute and relative paths is a setting in QGIS projects that I wasn’t aware of until the beginning of 2024. At that time I got the course material from a QGIS workshop a co-worker used to teach and which mentioned this option. Since then I have started teaching the QGIS workshops for this company and of course “Absolute and relative paths” is now also part of my workshops.

So is this an important setting? Well, you can use QGIS perfectly well without knowing that this setting exists, but it’s good to know about it – as you will see below. This blog post explains what absolute and relative paths are and when you should use each.

Does QGIS hang when loading data from a WFS? Try this!

June 17, 2025 by Michel Stuyts

Sometimes when you want to load data from a WFS web service, QGIS takes ages to load it or even seems to be unresponsive. Then there are some small settings you can change to try to fix this problem.

Using Data Defined Overrides in QGIS

June 10, 2025 by Michel Stuyts

Using Data Defined Overrides are a powerful tool in QGIS, but I’ve got the impression that too little people use this feature. So in this blog post you can learn what they are and I’ll show you a simple example of how to use them. You will notice this blog post is pretty long, but that doesn’t mean Data Defined Overrides are difficult, they just have loads of options and I wanted to show you every step I took to use them.

What are Data Defined Overrides?

In QGIS you can use data from a layer or an expression to change the value of a setting in a layer for that specific map object. This means that a setting is dynamically changed based on a value in the attribute table of that object or a value that is generated using an expression. In other words, if you use a Data Defined Override, the manually entered setting is ignored, and instead something else is used.