How to Create and Manage User Profiles in QGIS

User profiles is a powerful yet underrated feature that QGIS offers. With user profiles, you can create isolated personas for each aspect of your GIS career. 

For example, you can create a user profile for your nine-to-five, another user profile for your freelance projects and another for your personal exploration. And if you switch jobs, you can have profiles for the old organisation and another profile for the new organisation. Each user profile will be unaware of any credentials and configurations present in the others. 

Another usefulness of QGIS profiles is in plugin development. During development, you usually want a clean ‘vanilla’ environment. A new QGIS user profile will help you achieve that.

Enough of the talk, let’s get to action.

How to Add a New QGIS User Profile

Adding a new user profile in QGIS is simple and straightforward. Click settings from the top menu, hover on user profiles and click new profile.

In the dialogue box that pops up, type the name you wish into the input field and click the Okay button. 

Some Rules for Naming QGIS Profiles

While QGIS is flexible with its profile naming rules, there are a few general tips you should keep in mind so you don’t run into issues.

• User profile names are case insensitive. So you can’t create a user profile named Test_User if a user profile named test_user already exists.
• Avoid special characters and spaces in your names
• Ensure your profile names start with a letter or underscore: 
• Use clear and descriptive names

How to Switch User Profiles

To switch user profiles, click settings from the top menu, hover on user profiles and click the profile you wish to activate. After a while, you will see a new QGIS window. The new window will display your selected profile name in square brackets in the title bar.

How to Delete a User Profile

To delete a user profile in QGIS, first activate the profile by following the steps in the previous section. Then, open the active profile’s folder by clicking settings from the top menu, hover on user profiles and click open active profile folder. This will open a windows explorer window to the folder containing all the files of the active profile. This folder will typically be located at:

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\QGIS\QGIS3\profiles\<qgis_profile_name>

In the windows explorer window, open the immediate parent folder of the active user profile to reveal a list of all user profile folders. Delete the folder of the profile you wish to delete.

Now go back to QGIS and open the user profiles dropdown from the settings menu, you won’t see the deleted profile on the list.

These steps are quite long for a simple task of deleting a user profile but that's currently the only way.

However, an issue has been raised to the QGIS community and we hope they implement it soon.

How to Set Default Startup Profile in QGIS

On installation, QGIS creates a new user called default. This is the profile you will get whenever you launch QGIS (even after creating other profiles. You can change the startup profile by going to settings from the top menu and clicking options.

In the box that appears, click user profiles from the menu on the left. The Startup Profile section gives you the option to load QGIS with the last closed profile, set a particular profile to be launched on startup or prompt the user to pick a profile when launching QGIS.

How to Change User Profile Icon

Perhaps in the previous section, you noticed the change icon section from the User Profiles configuration window. You can click the placeholder image to open a windows explorer and select a profile image of your choice. You may also click the recycle button to reset the icon to the default placeholder.

Conclusion

User profiles is a powerful yet not-so-popular QGIS feature for organizing your GIS works. It helps you create isolated personas tailored to different aspects of your geospatial career. It also helps you declutter your GIS workspace thereby increasing your efficiency while working with QGIS.

Secondly, remember to adhere to best practices such as clear and descriptive naming and avoidance of special characters when naming your user profiles.

Finally, with your new understanding of QGIS user profiles, I'm confident that I've helped you take your GIS capabilities to another level.

In my next post, I will explore authentication configuration for QGIS user profiles so be sure to follow me on Twitter and linkedin so you don't miss it.