Forgive me if I have missed seeing this information posted elsewhere. I wish to create a place designation for a particular city that has extremely erratic boundaries for the city limits. I have been able to locate a link to a KML file, but it is out of date. The city does have a shape file I may request.
Is there a step-by-step tutorial anywhere to create a project using either one of these file types to map it? I’m not familiar with these mapping programs and it will have no value if I include or omit incorrect areas. A polygon outline is not specific enough nor remotely practical.
I am hoping to be able to use new and existing iNaturalist observations to document the need for a nature park instead of only additional tennis, basketball, pickle ball, etc. ball, concrete and parking lots.
Probably your best bet is to request the shapefile, convert it to kml (if you need help with that, I can give suggestions), create a Place, and upload your kml as the boundary for that place. Once your place is set up with the correct boundary, you can create a Project limited to your place. It should be fairly straightforward, but feel free to ask for more details on any step.
Are you willing to download QGIS (free) or would you rather use an online conversion tool? I don’t have a lot of experience converting online, but I just tried https://mygeodata.cloud/converter/shp-to-kml. It did convert the file to kml, though I found another issue in the process. iNat doesn’t like maps to have multiple features in them, so if the original shapefile contains multiple polygons as separate features rather than a single feature, you may have trouble. (You can check for this by running the conversion, then going to https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/ and creating a new map. Then import
your converted kml. One with multiple features will list multiple pieces.)
If you don’t mind sharing the original shapefile, I could do the conversion for you. Or I could try to walk you through setting up QGIS if you think that’s something you’d like to learn.
@valt QGIS is a powerful and free computer app (http://qgis.org/). Some things can be complicated in QGIS, but converting a shape file to a KML is pretty simple. I’d also suggest you give that a go.
I’ve attached a couple of screenshots of the process. In that “Save Vector Layer As…” window in the second screenshot, you just need to add a file name for your KML and select a folder to save it into (doing those things will fill in the two blank boxes below the format).
I just use Google Earth for this conversion. Add the shapefile as a user layer, then export as KML. Works like a charm, no need to learn new software unless you want to for other reasons.
