Monday, April 15, 2013

Overlaying Your GPS Tracks on Google Maps

Matt Neuburg:

I don’t know when Google Maps acquired the capability to display a KML/KMZ file. But it can now do so, and that’s why the earlier link in this article works. You, too, can export a waypoint or a track from your GPS tracking device, hand it to Google Maps, and provide your friends (or the whole world) with a link they can click to see that information in Google Maps.

This is great—previously I had been firing up Aperture to view tracks. Google Maps also works with GPX files, but the GPX format is verbose so sometimes it gives me an error about the file being too large. My GPS logger uses the NMEA log format, but I was able to use GPS Visualizer to convert to the compact KMZ format.

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The issue with KML/KMZ support in Google Maps is the restriction on the number of placemarks. Personally, I would need it to be able to display thousands of them.

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