QGIS Ricing! – Olivier Leroy

Thanks to Atanas and Keith Jenkins I learned recently that older versions of QGIS have dogs on their splash screens (the screen when QGIS is loading).

You can see them well archived by Thomas Gratier here

I liked version 0.3, which gives off strong GEOINT vibes! What if I could replace the current splash screen¹ with this old one?

On Ubuntu, QGIS stores user profiles in:

/home/defuneste/.local/share/QGIS/QGIS3/profiles

# you can go here with 
cd /home/$(whoami)/.local/share/QGIS/QGIS3/profiles

Tip

You can find that in Setting -> User Profiles -> Open Actives .., please see the documentation about it.

Create a new profile to play with:

You will automatically have a default profile folder (names default) containing plenty of goodies that you can experiment with.

I recommend creating a new profile. You can do it with the GUI, but it is easier to write about it using command line example.

# remember to navigate to profiles/ or change path 
cp -R default my_profile
cd my_profiles/QGIS/

You should just have a QGIS.ini file.

Get that fancy image and store it:

I create a repository to store the image. Feel free to adapt accordingly

mkdir -p ~/.config/qgis/
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/webgeodatavore/qgis-splash-screens-birthday/refs/heads/master/original-size/qgis_version_0.3.png
mv qgis_version_0.3.png ~/.config/qgis/splash.png

Customzied it!

We are going to create a QGISCUSTOMIZATION3.ini and specify our customization. I learned about it here.

echo -e "[Customization]\nsplashpath=/home/$(whoami)/.config/qgis/" \
> QGISCUSTOMIZATION3.ini
# or use your favorite text editor
# if you already have QGISCUSTOMIZATION3.ini it will overwrite it

Tip

It is Customization and not customization, guess who made that mistake…

Remember /home/$(whoami)/.config/qgis/ is where I previously saved my image, it should be named splash.png. Now, That I think about it, I could see changing that so it would be under my_profiles/.

After that you should just start QGIS with the specific profile and it will use the proper splash screen.

This is obviously a toy example but I really like the option to customize QGIS more. It can be useful to limit the UI to specific needs for students or coworkers so they would not be overwhelmed or just to have a more “lean” and personalized interface.

I am curious about what others can do! So please share your nice QGIS setup!

Footnotes

I also really like the current trend to use maps from different cities↩︎