Adding XYZ Tiles to QGIS ¶

Thanks to the great work of Grant Slater and the OpenStreetmap team, there are freely available XYZ tilesets for South Africa and Namibia 1:50 000 series toposheets which can easily be added to QGIS. Here is the general procedure to add a layer:

Steps ¶

1. Open the browser panel (View -> Panels -> Browser) and scroll down to the entry called XYZ tiles if needed.

2. Right-click the XYZ tiles entry and choose ‘New Connection…’

3. Enter the connection details (see URLs below)

4. Double click or drag-and-drop the XYZ tile layer into the canvas

5. You should see a nicely rendered tileset

Useful XYZ tile URLs ¶

1. Namibia 1:50 000 toposheets: https://namibia-topo.openstreetmap.org.za/layer/na_sgswa_topo_50k/{z}/{x}/{y}.png

2. South Africa 1:50k Toposheets: https://htonl.dev.openstreetmap.org/ngi-tiles/tiles/50k/{z}/{x}/{-y}.png

3. South Africa NGI Imagery: http://aerial.openstreetmap.org.za/ngi-aerial/{z}/{x}/{y}.jpg

4. Zanzibar Mapping Initiatives: https://tiles.openaerialmap.org/user/5ac4842b26964b0010033104/{z}/{x}/{y}.png