QGIS Labels – How to Hide Individual Labels

labelingqgis

I enabled labels for a streets layer in my QGIS 3.6.0 project via Properties > Labels > Single labels. The following screenshot shows an example of such labeling:

Street with multiple labels

How can I hide individual labels if the there are too many as in the example?

Best Answer

If there is no particular rule to which labels you want to hide and you want to manually toggle visibility, try playing around with the in-built label editing tools in QGIS 3.x (if you don't see it it's under View > Toolbars > Label Toolbar).

  1. Select the layer you want to edit the labels for.
  2. Click on the label visibility button (see label with eye icon in screenshot below)
  3. Shift-click on the label you want to hide. The first time you do this, a popup should show up asking you to select a primary key; select an attribute that contains an UNIQUE ID (preferably numeric).

enter image description here

For multi-part features I have sometimes used the move label feature to reduce it to one label. You can reset the label to the default visibility by control-clicking and dragging your mouse across the area where the label used to be.

Note that the label positioning is saved within an auxiliary database in the qgis project and not your file itself.

For line features another thing you can try is under the label settings > Rendering (the paintbrush symbol at the end) check 'Merge connected lines to avoid duplicate labels'.

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