Tutorial: Field surveys using Mergin Maps

3. Synchronizing your project with Mergin

Input comes with built-in functionality to seamlessly synchronise your projects and data through Mergin.

In this section we'll synchronize the project from the previouse sections with the Mergin cloud service.

1. Go to your internet browser and sign up to Mergin (https://public.cloudmergin.com/).

2. In QGIS install the Mergin plugin.

3. In the Browser panel you'll now find a Mergin folder.

Note 1: that there is no menu entry or toolbar icons for Mergin plugin. The only method to interact with the service is through the QGIS Browser panel.

Note 2: You may need to restart your QGIS to see Mergin in your QGIS browser panel after the installation.

To be able to view Mergin projects, we need to sign in:

4. In the browser panel, right-click on Mergin.

5. Select Configure.

Configure Mergin Plugin

6. A new window will appear:

For URL: type https://public.cloudmergin.com
For Username: type your Mergin username
For Password: type your Mergin password
Click Test Connection and it should show OK.

7. Click OK.

To view the list of your projects, click on the arrow to the right of Mergin in your QGIS browser panel.

Using Mergin plugin

The following functionalities are available from Mergin plugin:

Create a new project

8. You can start a new project by right-clicking on Mergin from the browser panel and selecting Create new project:

Type a name for Project name
Selecting Public will make your project available to all Mergin users
Project Directory will be the folder where your project and associated layers reside (the project that we made in the previous sections.

9. Click OK.

10. A popup window will appear that shows that the project was successfully created. Click Close.

Mergin project created successfully
11. You can find the project now under Mergin | My projects.

Mergin My Projects

12. Check the result on the Mergin website (https://public.cloudmergin.com/). Your project and its files should be listed there now.

Your project in Mergin

Now your project is synchronised with the Mergin cloud service and can be synchronised with the Input app on a smartphone or tablet, which will be explained in the section 4.

The following subsections are for reference for working with the Mergin plugin.

Download a project

To download a project:

Right-click on the project under Mergin, from the browser panel
Select Download
A new window will appear to set the folder path
Once the project is downloaded, you can select to Open the downloaded project.

Synchronise the changes

With Mergin service you can synchronise your local changes back to the server. Simply, right-click on the project from the browser panel and select Synchronize

You can also use Synchronize function to download changes made to your local projects from Mergin.

Remove a local/downloaded project

If you no longer want to have the project and its associated files available locally, you can delete them by right-clicking on the project from browser panel and select Remove locally.

Ensure to use this function to remove the projects. Deleting the files manually might cause synchronisation problems.

Remove project from server

This will remove your project from Mergin server. You need to first remove the project locally, to be able to delete it from the server.

You can also drag-and-drop your project folder (including layers, SVGs, etc) to Mergin project webpage.