Skip to content
GIMLabsDocs
Request a trial

Locations and site plans

Place and edit locations on the map, switch coordinate systems, group them, and lay out site plans.

Your locations are the heart of the map. This page covers placing and editing them, the coordinate systems they carry, grouping them, and laying out site plans. These are available on every plan.

Locations

Open the Locations layer to see your locations as markers. You can:

  • add, move and edit locations directly on the map,
  • read each location's coordinates in both WGS84 (latitude / longitude) and the project's grid (for example OSGB36, British National Grid), shown as you work. A position outside the project's grid is refused, with a message, rather than saved with meaningless numbers,
  • style markers by location type, or one location at a time, under Styles. A marker's symbol menu shows the marker as the map draws it. Default (the first choice) shows what it gets from its location type, the type's icon or a pin, and picking it removes a symbol set at that level.

Labels

Each location's label sits above its marker. To tidy them, open the Locations panel's Display tab:

  • Move labels: turn it on, then drag any label on the map to where you want it. A label moved away from its marker gets a dashed line back to it. You can also drag the label of the location chosen on the Position tab, or type its offset there.
  • Auto-arrange labels moves labels that overlap a marker or another label to the nearest free space around their own marker: above, below, beside or at a corner. Labels that are clear stay where they are. It works for the zoom you are at, so run it again after zooming, and drag any it gets wrong.

Map placement

Where a location has no survey coordinates, give it an internal map position from the table editor (the Map placement column on the Locations table) so it still appears on the map.

Coordinate systems

A project's coordinate system says which grid its eastings and northings are in. The configuration sets the default for its projects, and any project can choose its own, so a firm working in the UK and Slovenia can keep both side by side.

GIMLabs supports:

  • WGS84 (latitude and longitude), worldwide.
  • OSGB36 (British National Grid) for Great Britain.
  • The national grids of Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland (and Northern Ireland), Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden and Switzerland, for example D96/TM (EPSG:3794) in Slovenia or Lambert-93 (EPSG:2154) in France.
  • ETRS89 / UTM zones 28N to 38N for anywhere else in Europe, such as UTM 32N or 33N for Germany, Denmark, Norway or Italy.

Pick a grid by searching for the country, the grid's name or its EPSG code. The coordinate systems reference lists every grid with its EPSG code. GIMLabs converts between the project's grid and latitude/longitude to plot locations on the map, and refuses a position that falls outside the grid's country rather than guessing.

Older national datums

Grids on a modern European datum (ETRS89), such as D96/TM, convert exactly. Older datums such as Slovenia's D48/GK, Austria's MGI or Czechia's S-JTSK use the published datum shift, which is good to about a metre: plenty for the map, but not a survey-grade conversion.

Location groups

The Location Groups layer shows your location groups on the map, so you can see and work with a defined set of locations together.

Site plans

The Site Plans layer lets you lay out site plans - create, position and edit them on the map, with a parameters dialog to set them up. Site plans link to the project so they stay in step with your data.

Last updated 28 October 2026