Just picking up where I left off here…
I installed and started working with the other field geo-data collection app, called Input. It has a few drawbacks (so far) compared to QField, but it’s just as easy to use on the phone, and much easier to set up and transfer data back to the home computer.
Input is basically a phone app front end for Mergin, a cloud-based data storage service built to integrate with QGIS. Mergin stores the data that then can be synch’ed with QGIS on the desktop, or with the app. Data collection does not need to be sent to the cloud in real time if you have no data connection, but can be done later, and is “just push the button” easy, as is synching between the cloud and QGIS. (This is the biggest advantage over QField, which has a pretty clunky update workflow.)
The biggest problem I found so far has been that the data is not easily uploaded into a PostGIS table; the project relies on GeoPackages for data storage, even on the QGIS end. (Strictly speaking, there is a way to use PostGIS, but it seems involved, and needs to use another program that I have not yet tried.)
There is also the issue of cloud storage: a free account is limited to 100 MB, and while the actual “location and description” data is usually pretty small, all the accompanying photos, at 5-10 MB each, will quickly bump up against that limit. If I could offload the data and photos, from the cloud-based project into something else (like my computer, and PostGIS), this limit wouldn’t be so pressing, but the workflow is starting to look unwieldy again…
(Speaking of unwieldy, there is no direct way to store basemap tiles for offline use. Again, there is a way, but it’s not straightforward, and storing the tiles will also consume a significant portion of that 100MB limit.)
None of these problems are deal-breakers (so far), and the single advantage of easy synchronization more than makes up for the lot of them. I’ll be playing with Input/Mergin some more, but I think it’s the one I’ll decide to keep.
