I am working on a basic map, pulling coordinates from google earth, converting them to decimal degrees in excel, and then importing them into qgis. I am using qgis 1.8. When converting from degrees, minutes, seconds I get a coordinate in decimal degrees that looks like this (37.01879,-77.15026). This seems to be the correct gps coordinate for this given address. However, I imported my excel file as a delimiyed csv file, and found that none of the coordinates matched up. My project in qgis vis projected in wgs 84. I manually input the location in qgis, and the coordinates that were given back to me were this (11776056.2,3715032.7). I thought this might be because map units were set to meters, wrong projection, etc. But I cannot seem to figure out the issue. I have the same problem any time I try to take coordinates from Google Earth.
[GIS] Coordinate mix up
coordinate systemgoogle earthqgis
Best Answer
Unless your point is in the Antarctic, I guess you want (-77.15026, 37.01879)
In QGIS, coordinates are always East, North, not vice versa.
If you have coordinates in meters, look at the bottom left which Coordinate System is active. WGS84 and coordinates in Meters does not make sense. WGS84 (EPSG:4326) is usually in degrees.
You can load a Openstreetmap or Google background with the Openlayers plugin, if your project CRS is EPSG:3857. With the background, you cansee if your point is at the right place.