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Standalone program for converting coordinates in shapefiles

Geographic Information Systems Asked on July 10, 2021

Does anyone know of a standalone program that will convert the coordinates in a shapefile to another coordinate system?

By this I mean a program outside of a full GIS package. I have customers who need to convert shape files from one coordinate system to another so the file can be displayed in one of my company’s programs. I know that there are several shareware GIS programs that can do this. But I am trying to avoid having to help my customers install and learn how to use a whole GIS package just to do coordinate conversions.

My ideal program would be one where the user points to the shapefile, picks the target coordinate system, then the program writes a new shapefile, using the target coordinate system.

One Answer

A simple approach would be to use a command line tool that takes the input shapefile, reprojects the data, and outputs a new shapefile. You could just call the GDAL library (ogr2ogr has a reprojection option and supports the shapefile format). GDAL is free, lightweight, and the learning curve is minimal if you're only running one tool.

If simplicity is truly essential, you might consider not having them download/install anything and run the conversion as a service on your end using something like GeoServer, ArcGIS Enterprise, or FME Server. All of these programs offer reprojection packages that can be hosted as a service, which you could call from a web interface where they simply have to point to the file location.

Answered by Radar on July 10, 2021

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