UPDATE April 11, 2013: Updated the directions because the “Add delimited text layer” function moved from the Plugins to Layer menu. 

UPDATE March 24, 2011: I updated the directions to use GPS Visualizer instead of BatchGeocode.com because BG stopped giving geographic coordinates in its output.

Get directions on geocoding a single address in QGIS with a plugin.

QGIS is an open-source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) application that has been gaining ground since 2004. It runs on all operating systems (it began as a Linux project) and you can download it for free.

I use it often because ESRI doesn’t make the popular ArcGIS software for Mac. That’s unfortunate, but like I said here, software, technology and mapping issues can be easily overcome – we can use QGIS to create maps. QGIS, though, is missing one major feature for basic map building: geocoding.

Here’s a step-by-step tutorial on how to bring in multiple street addresses and their XY coordinates into your QGIS map en masse: Continue reading