QGIS – Removing Overlapping Portions of Polygons in Same Layer

Question

Is there a way to easily eliminate the overlapping portions of polygons in the same layer?

For example, I want to turn this

into this

I used Union to break the polygons apart where they overlapped, and then used Delete Duplicate Geometries to get rid of half the overlaps, but still had to manually delete the others. That's fine for the example, but won't work with the large amount of polygons that will be in the real data.

Answer 1

QGIS Processing Toolbox has a SAGA Polygon self-intersection tool (under SAGA | Vector polygon tools).

It works much like QIGS Union Tool, while this tool retains only one feature per the overlapped area.

Open the attribute table of generated Intersection layer and select Delete all features whose fid (or id) is 0.