Capturing Your First Field Data

• Install Mergin Maps Input
• Creating a project in Mergin Maps Input
• Capturing field data
• Summary

DANGER

This tutorial may differ from what you encounter when working with Mergin Maps. It will be updated soon to include recent changes in Mergin Maps, Mergin Maps Input and Mergin Maps plugin for QGIS.

In this tutorial you will learn how to:

• See your location shown on background maps on your mobile device
• Capture field data with their locations, photos and notes
• Query and edit field data

Install Mergin Maps Input

Download Mergin Maps Input to your Android device, iPhone or iPad. You can find it in the app store of your platform:

Creating a project in Mergin Maps Input

Data are stored within projects. We'll now create a new project to save our data into.

Mergin Maps Input offers the quickest and easiest way of creating new projects. Alternative methods offering much greater flexibility are introduced in later tutorials.

1. Open Mergin Maps Input on your mobile device

2. Go to the Home tab of the Projects screen and press Create project:
   

3. Give the project a name
   

4. Press Create project:
   

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   You may need to minimise the on-screen keyboard to access the Create project button.

Your new project should now be visible on the Home tab of the Projects screen:

Capturing field data

In the last step we created a project in which to store our field data. Let's now practice capturing some field data.

WARNING

The background map in this simple example requires network connectivity so may not work outside unless you have mobile internet.

1. Open the project by tapping its row in the Projects screen. You should see your location shown over the background map:
   

2. Pinch the map to zoom in to your current position. Recentre the map if needed using the GPS button.

3. Tap the Record button:
   

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   You can override the position of the point being captured at this stage by pinching and dragging the background map.

4. Press Add Point to capture a point:
   

5. Enter some notes and attach a photo using your camera:
   

   

6. Press Save when you're happy with the details you've entered:
   

   The feature you just captured should now be visible on the map:
   

7. Tap on one of the features you captured. A summary of the feature's attribute data will be shown with the option to edit it if required.
   

Summary

In this tutorial you learnt how to start capturing field data with very little effort, entirely from within Mergin Maps Input.

You may be wondering how you can survey area features or use your own background maps or scan barcodes. These things are all possible but are just covered in later tutorials.