[OSM-talk] Revisited: how to edit GPX tracks?

[Craig Wallace]

On 28/01/2010 14:14, Steve Bennett wrote:

Some comments on the ones of these I've used:

> Solutions proposed:
> - GPSbabel: only does conversion afaik, not editing.

GPSBabel does have various options for editing tracks, though they are 
not all available in the GUI (some of them are, click the "Filters" button).
eg to merge multiple files, just specify them all as inputs. And there 
is a simplify filter.
You can also extract parts of tracks based on time etc.
Some more details here:
http://www.gpsbabel.org/htmldoc-1.3.6/Advanced_Usage.html
http://www.gpsbabel.org/htmldoc-1.3.6/filter_track.html

> - JOSM: promising, but JOSM is always very slow on my machine, and I
> can't figure out how to edit gpx traces directly, other than
> converting them to data layers first. not sure if this will solve all
> my needs. I do like the colour highlighting though.

Have you tried the EditGPX plugin? It automatically converts the tracks 
to a separate EditGPX layer to allow editing, and converts back to GPX.

> - Garmin BaseCamp: may actually be able to do some of this, but
> unusably slow on large amounts of data, and has some really funky
> ideas about how to manage a "collection" of tracks.
> - Garmin MapSource: no editing of traces that I can see.

MapSource has some options for track editing. First, make sure you have 
a fairly recent version. There are options on the toolbar for track 
draw, erase, select, join, divide. And you can simplify tracks (right 
click on the track, then Track Properties -> Filter).
You can also have several MapSource windows open and copy and paste 
between them.
I have found MapSource can be a bit slow at opening large GPX files, but 
its usually OK once they are open. I have noticed that if you save the 
track as a GDB file it loads much quicker in MapSource.


Craig