WHAT IS THE PROBLEMA WHEN THE QCHAINAGE WHEN YOU METERS IT WILL BACK TO DEGREES?
The problem is usually that QChainage is working in a geographic CRS like WGS84, where units are in degrees instead of meters. The fix is to use a projected CRS with meter units, because QChainage expects linear distance values.
What is happening
When a layer or project is in degrees, the plugin may show strange results or convert distances incorrectly because it is measuring angular coordinates rather than real-world length. A forum answer on the same issue says you generally cannot force the plugin to measure degrees as meters; you need to reproject the layer to a metric CRS instead.
How to solve it
- Check the layer CRS and the project CRS.
- Reproject the line layer into a CRS that uses meters.
- Run QChainage again on the projected layer.
That usually removes the “it goes back to degrees” problem.
Why this matters
A YouTube example about QChainage shows the tool being used to create chainage points at regular meter intervals along a line, which only works properly when the data are in a meter-based CRS.
Common mistake
If your data are still in EPSG:4326 or another lat/long system, the plugin may appear to “switch back” to degrees because that is the native unit of the coordinates. In that case, the issue is not the plugin itself but the coordinate system.
TL;DR: reproject the line layer to a metric CRS first, then run QChainage so it measures in meters instead of degrees.