Reinder shared this “Stimulating the use of tap water in the bottle that you bring yourself – at the Kohnstammhuis, University of Amsterdam”

‪Courtney Yatteau shared this picture heading to the ESRI User Conference 2025

Reinder spotted this map stall at a market for 2nd hand books, arts, antiques and similar items in The Hague

Mr LeCartographe found this large physical map of Africa in Japanese at a second-hand shop

Following on from yesterday’s post from Harlingen, here is a different version of the town plan alongside the harbour.

Dr Dawn Wright shared her picture heading earlier this year to the ESRI User Conference 2025.

This amazing tiled map of New York brings a new meaning to a tile service. The design and implementation is by Allison Eden Studios

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Everything you need to visit Cambridge.

For QField 3.7, we opted for a shorter development cycle that focused on polishing preexisting functionalities from feature form editor widgets improvement through to better nearby Bluetooth device discovery. Of course, we couldn’t help ourselves and still packed in some nice functionality that we thought deserved to reach QField’s growing community as soon as possible.

Main highlights

One of the most interesting new functionalities from this development cycle has been the ability to stamp details on photos taken by QField’s in-app camera. A basic version of this has been supported for a while now; this new version offers flexible customisation of details stamping onto photos, including changing the font size, colour, and horizontal position, as well as providing users with the ability to completely change the details via expression-driven templates and add image overlays onto the photo.

The custom details stamping configuration lives within project files, allowing for individual projects to drive styling and details. The configuration interface is provided by QFieldSync and can be found in the project properties dialog by switching to the QField panel when setting up projects in QGIS:

The other significant addition in this release is the new plugin manager’s Available Plugins tab, which offers a curated list of plugins that can easily be installed with a single tap. The list makes it much easier to discover plugin-delivered functionalities such as online routing, geocoding searches, and much more.

The plugin manager can also alert users of available updates for their installed plugins, ensuring that crucial bug fixes and improvements are easily delivered. When a new version is released, users can update via a single tap. We are looking into the possibility of enabling automated plugin upgrades soon.

Long-time users of QField are probably aware of a nifty feature that allowed individual project layers to be locked, and for that lock to be driven by a data-defined property expression. For this new version, we’ve supercharged the layer lock functionality by breaking it down into four distinct vector layer permissions that can be disabled: i) feature addition, ii) attribute editing, iii) geometry editing, and iv) feature deletion. These permissions can be disabled by activating a checkbox or conditionality turned on via a data-defined property expression.

The disabling of permissions using a data-defined property expression allows for interesting scenarios when paired with QField-driven expression context variables such as the user name of a logged-in QFieldCloud account (@cloud_username), GNSS positioning (@gnss_coordinate) and more. Users can easily restrict permissions based on the user interacting with a cloud project, or form advanced geofencing-like rules based on location, time of the day, etc. For more details on available variables, read this page on QField’s growing documentation site.

Improvements all around

As mentioned above, this version focused on polishing preexisting functionality. Noteworthy improvements include:

• support for multiple column display as well as the ability to filter value relation lists;
• support for reversing the sorting order of the relationship editor’s children lists;
• smoother scanning process to discover nearby Bluetooth devices when adding external GNSS devices; and
• support for feature identification against vector tile layers (give that a try with the new OpenStreetMap shortbread vector tiles!).

Finally, life for QFieldCloud users has improved with the support for resuming large file downloads when fetching a cloud project, eliminating the need to restart from scratch after an interruption due to poor connectivity. In addition, users will notice a new notification badge on the top-left main menu button, indicating that a cloud project has pending changes ready to be pushed to the server.

We hope you enjoy this new version as much as we do delivering it to you. Happy field mapping!

Harry Wood shared these pics of the giant floor map at the National Maritime Museum.

Our friend Derick shared this picture of a Secret Highlands distillery bottle

Barry spotted this in a thrift shop and shockingly, managed to resist buying. He said “Anyone want a giant mappy bag for idk, laundry, or their map collection? Local charity shop find. Didn’t buy. Resisting temptation”

Reinder sent this to us, he said “Some brand of jeans does join in celebrating 750 years of Amsterdam, by projecting this map kind of thing on the window.”

I am wondering whether there is a connection between the 750 years of Amsterdam and the end of season sale?

Raf sent us this bottle of white wine from Catalunya, Spain.

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Elizabeth spotted these at a map stall in Washington DC, Minneapolis alongside Munich!

We love camper vans with nappy decoration. This one comes from Raf, photo taken near Sant Cugat del Vallès, Barcelona

Reinder said “I had never heard of it, but it turns out that there is a knowledge mile in Amsterdam … see https://knowledgemile.amsterdam/nl

I have ever been to Glastonbury but from the pictures it looks to be a massive site the equivalent of a medium sized town. Getting from stage to stage could be challenging so someone came up with the bright idea to try a bit of Becksploitation and to produce a diagram in the style of the London Tube Map. I don’t think it would be much help but it would have been a nice souvenir.

Candles shelf decorated with globes at Les Topettes perfume shop in Barcelona, from Raf

Marc-Tobias sent us this pic of a shop with a sign that says “Your Location” plus the coordinates. I haven’t said where he took this pic because I thought you might enjoy looking up the coordinates.

Want to shape the future of HTML? The State of HTML 2025 survey is live – and it includes a question about MapML and mapping on the web!

This survey directly influences which web platform features get prioritized by browser vendors and standards bodies. Your 15 minutes could help determine whether native web mapping becomes reality.

Through a series of saveable questions, the survey asks devs to document their use and knowledge of both existing HTML, as well as for new proposed features. Thanks to Lea, we were able to contribute a question into the survey’s Content section that asks developers about MapML, and provides a close-to-default markup of what a MapML web map might look like in an excellent future HTML.

Try it yourself: Experience what the survey’s native HTML maps could feel like with our interactive demo. Explore more possibilities in our documentation.

Take Action Now:

• Fill out the survey (15 minutes)
• Share it with your developer network
• Especially encourage geospatial/mapping developers to participate

The survey closes August 1st 2025 – don’t let this opportunity to influence web standards slip by.

Raf sent us this photo of a local shop in Pamplona with a half globe in its sign

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Elizabeth sent me this, I wasn’t sure but I think it just gets over the editorial bar.

Raf sent us this photo of a map representing Yu Garden and the surrounding area in Shanghai.

We have a had several pics of the Upside Down World outside LSE, these are different because I was there myself with some of my best geo-nerd mates.

When you get to study this globe up close it prompts lots of conversation. Ed pointed out how big a portion of the globe is without any significant land mass.

Denise showed us the parts of Papua New Guinea that she visited as a student, it’s much bigger than I realised.

The PostGIS Team is pleased to release PostGIS 3.6.0beta1! Best Served with PostgreSQL 18 Beta2 and soon to be released GEOS 3.14.

This version requires PostgreSQL 12 - 18beta2, GEOS 3.8 or higher, and Proj 6.1+. To take advantage of all features, GEOS 3.14+ is needed. To take advantage of all SFCGAL features, SFCGAL 2.2.0+ is needed.

• source download md5

• NEWS

• HTML Online en ja sv fr zh_Hans

• PDF docs: en ja, sv, zh_Hans, fr

• Cheat Sheets:

  • postgis: en ja sv fr zh_Hans
  • postgis_raster: en ja sv fr zh_Hans
  • postgis_topology: en ja sv fr zh_Hans
  • postgis_sfcgal: en ja sv fr zh_Hans
  • address standardizer, postgis_tiger_geocoder: en ja sv fr zh_Hans

This release is a beta of a major release, it includes bug fixes since PostGIS 3.5.3 and new features.

A fabric sold by the meter at El Barato shop in Reus, with a vintage map pattern. Sent by Raf.

Raf sent us this shop in Suzhou, in the tourist area by the main canal.

GeoServer 2.27.2 release is now available with downloads (bin, war, windows), along with docs and extensions.

This is a stable release of GeoServer recommended for production use. GeoServer 2.27.2 is made in conjunction with GeoTools 33.2, and GeoWebCache 1.27.2.

Thanks to Peter Smythe (AfriGIS) for making this release.

CITE certification achieved

The GeoServer team are really pleased to announce that our long-lost CITE Certification has been regained (for 2.27) over the last 6 months.

OGC CITE Certification is important for two reasons:

• Provides a source of black-box testing ensuring that each GeoServer release behaves as intended.
• Provides a logo and visibility for the project helping to promote the use of open standards.

Many thanks to all who were involved! After approximately 10 years, we can once again officially confirm that GeoServer is OGC compliant. Thank you especially to Gaia3D and OSGeo:UK for sponsorship covering the expense of CITE Certification for 2025.

For more details, please read the separate announcement.

Release notes

New Feature:

• GEOS-11805 Option to disable the management of stored queries

Improvement:

• GEOS-11877 Improve CoverageView composition to support noData fill on missing bands/coverages

Bug:

• GEOS-10728 Cannot download GeoPackage if the source data contains UUID types
• GEOS-11708 STAC breadcrumbs rendering as plain text
• GEOS-11820 WCS spatial sub-setting does not work when native CRS != declared CRS
• GEOS-11832 count=0 service exception for some formats
• GEOS-11857 Random NPE In LocalWorkspaceCallback
• GEOS-11862 Layer Preview and Tile Layers page dropdown links broken after updating table
• GEOS-11865 MapDownloadProcess washes out 1 band gray images when transparency is on
• GEOS-11866 Prevent requests setting variables that should only be set by GeoServer
• GEOS-11879 Xalan causes a java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError

Task:

• GEOS-11831 OseoDispatcherCallback improvements
• GEOS-11834 Update PMD to 7.13
• GEOS-11882 Cleanup postgis-jdbc dependencies

For the complete list see 2.27.2 release notes.

Community Updates

We list these community modules purely as a service to the community to raise awareness of interesting add-ons to support, if there is sufficient common interest. They are not “production ready”.

How to make contact: browse the GitHub repo (https://github.com/geoserver/geoserver/tree/main/src/community > module > History) to see who:

• a) made the original commit,
• b) has been making changes (other than refactoring/dependency updates).

If you want to use a community module (in production), YOU need to arrange funding to:

• a) promote it to an official extension (passing tests, etc.) and
• b) maintain it going forward.

Community module development:

• GEOS-11727 OGC API Tiles tests require tile links to be available in the collections resource too
• GEOS-11728 OGC API Tiles returns an invalid content-disposition header
• GEOS-11822 OGC API procesess basic implementation
• GEOS-11829 Features templating ability to override schema
• GEOS-11830 Smart data loader create store page fails when environment variables are in use
• GEOS-11839 New Community Module for WPS Download in NetCDF output format for spatiotemporal coverages
• GEOS-11847 Next link is missing in “Search” OGC API - Features proposal implementation when startIndex is not set
• GEOS-11870 Singlestore(MemSql) datastore community module
• GEOS-11871 Allow native execution of group by in DGGS store, when grouping on geometries
• GEOS-11874 Align OGC API tiles API spec with specification
• GEOS-11875 Execute OGC API Tiles CITE tests
• GEOS-11876 WPS Vertical Longitudinal Profile: Support automatic distance computation
• GEOS-11878 WFS HITS request returns the whole data records on a GML feature templated layer
• GEOS-11880 OGC API Maps is not showing up in GeoServer home page
• GEOS-11883 OGC API process description lacks links
• GEOS-11884 OGC API process HTML input/outputs lack occurrences and formats

About GeoServer 2.27 Series

Additional information on GeoServer 2.27 series:

• GeoServer 2.27 User Manual
• CITE Certification achieved
• GeoServer 2025 Q2 Developer Update
• GeoServer 2025 Roadmap
• Content-Security-Policy Headers
• OGCAPI Features Extension
• File system access isolation
• Promote data dir catalog loader to core

Release notes: ( 2.27.2 | 2.27.1 | 2.27.0 )