How to Simplify a Map

If you’re using custom maps in the Dashboard and they take a long while to load or process filters, this may be due the maps being in very high resolution, very high resolution maps take longer to process because they have too much detail on them; most of the time, you can discard part of that detail and still have a high resolution map that will load and process faster.

This process is called simplify and you can do it using the open source tool QGIS (available here: http://qgis.org/), and following these steps:

1.- Download and install the latest version QGIS.

2.- Open the QGIS Desktop application (you can do it from the Start Menu).

3.- On the Browser Panel (at the left) navigate to the shapefile you want to modify and add it to your project (double click it).

4.- Go to Vector->Geometry Tools->Simplify Geometries.

5.- There verify that the layer selected is the one with the map you want to simplify.

6.- Under Simplify Tolerance put how much you’d like to simplify the map (0.0010 is the recommended value as the default value will do very little simplification).

7.- Select the option Save to New File and click on browse and select a name for your simplified map.

8.- If you want to see the result in QGIS, leave the Add Result to Canvas option enabled otherwise disable it.

9.- Clik Ok and wait for the process to end.

10.- Once it’s done review the map and if it’s fine, close QGIS and load the map in DBxtra.

As a rule of thumb any map bigger than 1MB will take a while to load, so you can play with the Simplify Tolerance option to make your map smaller than that, so you can be sure that the map respond quickly in DBxtra.