The free desktop companion for Geosurvey. Turn any raster into an offline basemap for the phone before you go out, and look through the survey backup on a map when you come back — no GIS desktop needed.
Desktop app · Linux, Windows, macOS · Free for anybody · In testingA homestead is where you prepare before going out and where you bring the work back to. Nothing Homestead does is required to use Geosurvey; it makes the day easier.
GeoTIFF, JPEG2000 or anything else GDAL reads becomes an MBTiles basemap Geosurvey loads offline. WebP by default for the smallest file; PNG when it must be lossless.
The raster is cut into bands and tiled in parallel, one worker per thread, with a few threads left for the desktop. Large drone orthophotos convert in minutes, not hours.
Drop in the ZIP the phone exported. Layers, tracks, photos and forms appear on a map straight from the GeoPackage inside it, exactly as they were collected.
Full-text search across every attribute of every layer, with the hit flown to on the map. Click a feature to identify it; page through attributes as a table.
Vector tiles are cut on demand from the GeoPackage's own spatial index, so country-scale reference data pans smoothly without any server process.
Geotagged media from the survey shows as thumbnails and opens full size, linked to the feature it documents.
GDAL and PROJ travel inside the package. Nothing to install first, no account, no telemetry, and your data never leaves your machine.
Homestead is free for anybody, with no feature gates. It is built by the people who build Geosurvey.
Before the survey: convert the orthophoto or the scanned map into an MBTiles file and copy it to the phone; Geosurvey uses it as an offline basemap.
After the survey: export a backup from Geosurvey, open it in Homestead, and check the work on a map before it goes into QGIS or GeoVertix.
Homestead is in testing with the Geosurvey team and a few field partners. Downloads for Linux, Windows and macOS will appear on this page once that round is done.