Clipping Features
“Clipping” extracts features or portions of features within the bounds of a polygon layer, maintaining the attributes of the input (clipped) layer. In effect, the Clip tool acts as a cookie cutter.
Included in this tutorial:
Accessing the Clip Tool
Reviewing the Clip Tool Parameters
Running the Tool and Examining Results, with an example
Software version in examples: QGIS 3.34.11 Prizren
Tutorial Data: The tutorial includes demonstration with sample data available here.
Credits: L. Meisterlin (2025)
This tutorial reviews using the vector geoprocessing tool, called “Clip” in QGIS.
Accessing the Clip Tool
To access the Clip tool, you can click through Vector > Geoprocessing Tools > Clip via the main menu.
Alternatively, you can search or navigate through the Processing Toolbox. There, you will find the Clip tool within the Vector Overlay toolset.
accessing the Clip tool within the main menu
accessing the Clip tool within the Processing toolbox
Notice that the Processing Toolbox contains other related tools. The Vector Overlay Clip tool (highlighted in the image above) will be demonstrated in this tutorial. The GDAL toolset includes similar vector tools as well as raster equivalents.
The Clip Tool Parameters
The tool’s basic parameters require specifying the layer to be “clipped” and the layer that will serve as the “cookie cutter.” These parameters are described below.
Input layer: This is the layer that will be clipped. This means that the features or portions of features within the bounds of the overlay layer (below). The input layer can be points, lines, or polygons. If the Input Layer has an active selection, you have an additional checkbox option to clip selected features only.
Overlay layer: This is the layer that specifies the clipping boundary. It must include polygon feature(s). If the Overlay layer includes an active selection, you will have an additional checkbox option to use selected features only as the clipping boundary.
Output options: Under Clipped, specify whether and where to save the output layer (click the ellipsis [...] button to access saving and naming options) or to create a temporary layer, as well as the checkbox option to add the resulting layer to the current map project.
the Clip tool parameters, with example inputs
Running the Tool and Examining Results, with an Example
In this example, we clip a polygon layer’s features based on which portions are included within the boundary of another polygon. (See the image above for the tool’s inputs.) The image below illustrates the input layers’ geometry.
the example input layers
The grey polygon layer (called “Blocks_prj”) will be clipped by the pink polygon of the overlay layer (called “aBuffer”).
Extra Note: the Overlay layer is a quarter-mile buffer around one point selected randomly from the Points1 layer in the Standard Tutorial Data package. (A link to Tutorial Data is provided above.)
After running the tool, the result is a subset of the input Blocks_prj polygons. It includes all the features that were completely contained within the overlay clipping layer’s boundaries. It also includes the contained portions of features that were originally only partially within the clipping layer’s boundaries.
The images below illustrates the output geometry, with the newly created clipped polygon layer (called “Clipped”).
resulting layer geometry, overlaid on the input layers
resulting layer geometry, without the input layers
The output layer’s attributes include all the original attributes from the clipped features in the input layer. In the image below, we compare the attribute tables of the input Blocks_prj layer and the newly created Clipped layer, highlighting a feature with new geometry. Note that the original attribute values are unchanged.
comparison of input and output attributes
NOTE: Depending on your data type, your output layer may include newly generated automatic geometry fields, such as area and perimeter, which will represent the new properties of the clipped layer.