Now you can pan, zoom, and navigate the map like any other layer.

Add the basemap to your project by dragging it from the Broswer Panel into the map area or adding it from the QGIS Data Source Manager.

You will now see that the new connection has been added under XYZ tiles.

In this example I’ve added the URL for Google Satellite.

In the new window enter a name for the new connection and provide the URL to the tiled map service (from the table above), then click OK.

This will open a new window to enter the connection details.

Right-click on ‘XYZ Tiles’ and select ‘New Connection’.

Navigate to the QGIS Browser panel and find the XYZ tiles section.

This is easy to do and is explained by the directions below. Now that we have the links to the tiled maps sources we need to add them to QGIS as XYZ tiles. Links to Google basemap layers Add XYZ Tiles to QGIS I obtained links to the maps from NextGIS and included them in the table below. They are Google Maps, Google Satellite, Google Satellite Hybrid, Google Terrain, and Google Roads. There are five different Google Maps products you can link to. The first thing you need to add Google Maps or Google Satellite to QGIS is a link to the map source. This linked example shows you how to add a basemap from another satellite imagery source as a WMS layer. On a side note, there are a lot of other basemaps you can add to QGIS. This tutorial will walk you through the process step by step.

If you’re not sure how to do what I just described, don’t worry. Then add the link to the XYZ tiles in the QGIS browser. To add Google Maps to QGIS you just need a link to the tile map service layers you want to use. You can easily add these layers to QGIS as XYZ tiles. Google Maps and Google Satellite are probably the most recognized map layers in the world. The great thing is that it is very easy to add other basemap sources to QGIS. However, one of its shortcomings is that it only comes with one default basemap, Open Street Map. QGIS is a very powerful and customizable software.

Google maps satellite street view