In this video, I just wanted to show you the Temporal Controller.

That's something that actually has been around since Pi 3.3.1.4.

I'm on 3.2.8, I think.

Yeah, Florence.

And in order to demonstrate this widget, I just thought I'd use the QGIS releases, really.

The QGIS releases have got a date for each release.

And I just wanted to see, well, geographically, based on the name of the release, i.e.

Florence or what have you, just where did they, Zanzibar, sort of where they were geographically located as each year sort of went by.

I've taken a couple of assumptions on the naming.

And obviously, I don't think I've mapped the Pi one.

But as you can see, if I look at my table, this is just a CSV file.

Oh, sorry, I meant attributes.

So here you see I've got a, there's the code name.

So Bon and Madeira, Zanzibar requests.

So there's some clear names there.

Obviously, Pi, like I said, I don't have coordinates for, but I suppose I could have just made up something.

And the core one, I made an assumption there.

It's a place in India.

Weirdly, I've actually been there on my travels.

So yeah, I made an assumption about that one.

But the point is they've got a release date, a single field.

If I just click at the top, yes, I was on the 3rd of 3rd.

And then down here, I've got this one, version one on the 5th of the 1st.

So point being, I'd like these points to slowly appear on the map as the years tick by.

I've used point geometry, could be anything, could be any layer.

And like I said, the data's come from a CSV file.

So it's not delicate about data source or anything or geometry.

So just go for it.

This will get you going.

How do you use temporal controller?

There's a widget up here, clock face.

Click on that.

And that brings up the controller.

But what you've got to do is make sure if you right and mouse click on your properties for the layer is that on temporal properties, you've got these settings configured.

You need to activate them.

So this will give you a dynamic control over the layer in terms of time.

And this is probably what you're really after rather than a simple date time slice.

So I've got a, well, that's correct.

I've got a single field with date time.

And I want to include the start and end to sort of draw.

There's sort of no limits really.

The field is indeed release date.

That's the only field I've that's date type.

And I want to accumulate features over time.

But actually I could say, you know what, just leave them on the map effectively for a specific duration of an event.

These are sort of called events.

Something happened.

And so you can imagine it could be maybe earthquake data or something.

But I've just got these as releases of this software.

But I'm just going to pile up the points over time.

I'm going to accumulate them.

I don't want them removed from the map.

Press okay.

And as you can see, the maps cleared a bit because the start point for my controller, when you turn this on and off is that one over there.

And if I just click on that, yeah, fifth of the first.

And you can see that the current frame up there, you can see what the current frame is set up, which is, which includes that.

So you have to imagine I'm looking through time now.

I've got this time rendered layer.

It's not just a simple layer.

So it's literally as expected, adding another dimension.

This is something I'll just use that we're familiar with.

They've got sort of timeline capability.

I'm trying to think if it's, I don't think it's in map info.

I can't remember.

I'll have a look.

But anyway, and it used to be a plugin, this.

It used to be a plugin called time series animator or something.

But now it's a widget.

So what do we want to do here?

Well, when you hit this refresh here, you can have a look at the other options.

You can set to the full range of what is in the data.

So when we look to that attribute table, you can see that, you know, from the third of the third.

So that's why it's captured that as the end.

And from the, let's reverse that.

So the start there is fifth of the first, you see, and then the end third of the third.

So that's what effectively that refresh is doing, reading data and setting the start and end to what you want.

How do you want the playback to happen?

I actually, we could do it by months, but that, yeah, there's some gaps between releases.

So it's probably quicker just to do years, make a sort of step.

Every animated frame is like a year.

So let us press play.

Let's just go for it.

So I press play and you can see it flicking through, changing the dates up here.

So first, so we're now into that year, into 2015, 2017, 2018 is appearing, 2020, 21, 22.

And there was another one drawn in 23.

You can use the map as this is doing.

So let's just zoom into this sort of North, Northern Europe sort of area.

And let's just, and if I, if I grab hold of the widget, as you can see, I can sort of pull back and look through the time sort of steps.

So, and, and sort of look at my data like that, which is pretty neat, really, as you can imagine, you can have much more, you can, you can have shaded polygons or something, you know, thematics, et cetera, heat maps and stuff.

You could do some interesting stuff with this, but this is just to show you with, with this point data, especially when you've got a massive point data, perhaps epidemiological data or something, you know, certainly for things like sort of COVID and things like that, it'd be very appropriate.

Anyway, note, there's a little settings button over here.

You can just do a couple of sort of changes here.

You can just set the frame rate, for example, how many frames per second.

So there's, you know, there's a little, little change that you can do.

One thing to note here is you can actually save the animation.

That's what the save button here will do, export the animation.

If you click on that, you can set your file naming convention and let's put this in the folder I created before.

You can set the, just, I've just left it as the current extent, the kind of resolution you're pixels and the range you're including in this, which is just defaulted to that.

So when you press save on this, what it will do is output each PNG.

And actually, if I pull the dialogue over here, you can see them all being created and they go.

So you can use these PNGs as you wish, perhaps to create a GIF or some other software or what have you, but that's how you export animation just by the little save button.

But anyway, that's, that's more or less it.

The key thing to remember about this all is properties, temporal component of this properties, make sure you set what you need in here and then off you go.

But that's a quick start, a few other buttons there for you to play with, but I hope that gets you going.

Thank you.