GPS Visualizer Help

About GPS Visualizer

Frequently Asked Questions

The FAQ contains a lot of useful information about specific map formats, as well as some more general information about GPS Visualizer.

Form input help file

This is the file that comes up when you click the little "help" icons in the map and profile input forms; it contains explanations of (almost) all the possible form input widgets.

Examples

This page contains a few examples of the kinds of maps you can make with GPS Visualizer.

Tutorials

If you have data that came directly from a GPS unit, and you just want to see where you've been, using GPS Visualizer is very easy: you upload the file and you get a map.

For some purposes, though — including some that take advantage of GPS Visualizer's most powerful features — the data might need to be organized a little bit before being processed, and that's where these tutorials come in.

• Building Plain-Text Waypoint Files

  No matter what you're trying to do with your data, read this one first! There are a lot of important concepts in this tutorial that will help when you are reading the others.

• Building Plain-Text Track Files

  How to force plain-text data to be interpreted as tracks instead of waypoints; how to include multiple tracks in the same file; how to mix in routes and/or waypoints with track data.

• Smoothing & Simplifying Tracks

  How to use GPS Visualizer's track-smoothing filters to reduce GPS artifacts and create smaller files.

• Calculating Elevation Gain

  Learn why elevation gain is so difficult to get right, and how GPS Visualizer can help.

• Mapping Quantitative Data

  Learn how to take advantage of GPS Visualizer's ability to resize and/or colorize points based on any field in your data, and how to make GPS Visualizer perform automatic frequency counts on your location-based data (e.g., ZIP codes).

• Heat Maps

  If you have a lot of coordinates that you want to plot en masse, where the individual points aren't important but intensity per unit area is of interest, you can add a "heatmap" as a layer to a GPS Visualizer Leaflet map.

• Drawing circles/range rings around waypoints

  GPS Visualizer can draw circles of a specific radius around your points, allowing for definition of circular ranges or triangulation between points.

Leaflet/Google Maps Tricks

HTML Maps created by GPS Visualizer can be customized as much as you want. Not everything is documented in detail, but here are a few example maps that demonstrate some of the possibilities:

• Elevation profile inside a map - If your trackpoints contain elevation data, you can choose to have a profile displayed right inside the map.
• Custom map backgrounds - Add to or alter the "map type" menu.
• Folders in a marker list - Organize your waypoints/markers into "folders" that can be collapsed and/or hidden with a click.
• More fun with folders - In this example, the folder names were "synthesized" from existing fields in the input data.
• Filter markers with a text pattern - Set up links that cause only certain markers to be shown on the map.
• Google Docs/Drive Spreadsheet - Create a map whose markers are loaded on-the-fly from an online spreadsheet.
• Dynamically loaded GPX or KML - Put a GPS data file (in GPX or KML format) on your site, and have the map load the tracks and waypoints dynamically.
• Using PHP & GPX to build maps - Create dynamic maps on your Web site using a single PHP template.
• Database-driven map - Markers are loaded from a MySQL database and updated when the map's viewport is moved.
• Geotagged photos - Make a map of the locations of geotagged photos, including thumbnails.
• Geolocation - Center a map on the viewer's current position.