I have a dataset in the form of a personal geodatabase (mdb) and am interested in using certain feature classes for further processing.
My problem is – I am using USGS data orthoimagery which comes in UTM coordinate system and am unable to reproject my geodatabase feature class (layer) to UTM. The same task is easily done in ArcGIS, but I want to use QGIS as there are other features of QGIS that I intend to use later on.
What I have tried:
1) Save geodatabase layer (feature class) as shp and try to reproject that shp –> the reproject task does not proceed beyond 2% completion and I end up with a 1KB shp file
2) Reproject mdb layer (Feature class) directly to UTM –> It does not allow me to do this either.
3) Create shapefile from mdb layer (feature class). Define projection for the shp file. Reproject this shp file. –> this also results similar to (1)
So, for some reason, projecting layers that have their origin from an ESRI mdb do not seem to be reprojected in QGIS.
Any help/tips on this would be welcome.
Thanks in advance.
Best Answer
This is a problem I have seen many times with shapefiles coming off arc*: they are missing the .prj file. If this file is missing, then the GIS Desktop programs cannot determine the vecto projection. In QGIS if you don't change the behaviour in "options -> CRS", the program will give the wgs84 CRS to everything is loaded and that is missing an explicit CRS. If this happens you then have to manually give the layer its own CRS, or as I said, change how QGIS behave in this situations. To correct the problem at the source you can for example re-save the vector ("save as...") and choosing the right CRS or you can use the tool "define vector projection" in the vector menu. For rasters you can do the same with different tools in the "raster" menu.