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

[Randy]

Steve Bennett wrote:

>I posted this question a few weeks ago and got some answers. I've been
>using Prune until now, but it's really not satisfactory. I've also
>tried out a couple of the other tools suggested, and they're pretty
>bad too.
>
>Here's my basic use case:
>I've just come back from a 4 day bike trip where I collected about
>11Mb worth of gpx files, numbered 32.gpx-45.gpx and current.gpx,
>spanning about 250km (tracing 1 point per second while it was on). I
>want to merge them into one trace, then upload pieces of these to OSM,
>and also to some other sites. I want to totally disregard the original
>boundaries between traces (which I think represent either the GPS
>being turned off/on, or a trace getting too long).
>
>In short, I need to be able to:
>- merge multiple traces
>- be able to visually select pieces of a trace to either delete (for
>privacy/tidiness) or export
>- simplify a trace down to a much smaller number using some smart algorithm
>
>Preferably with an OSM slippy map type background.
>
>This sounds like a very small ask to me. I don't need it to directly
>interface with the GPS, convert formats or anything. Features like
>converting speeds to colour are nice, as are showing georeferenced
>photos.
>
>Solutions proposed:
>- Prune: very flakey on large numbers of traces, pretty tedious having
>to work in terms of ranges, pretty dumb how it sequences traces in the
>order you load them, not the order of their timestamps. The OSM
>background usually dies after a few minutes. Can't export ranges
>(instead you have to delete the rest of the trace).
>- EasyGPS: lacks the features I need. Fast though!
>- GPSu(tility): the "shareware" version is too crippled to evaluate,
>plus the interface looks pretty bad.
>- GPSbabel: only does conversion afaik, not editing.
>- GPSman: after 15+ minutes of going around in circles on the site, I
>can't even find the file to download. Or a clear statement whether it
>runs on windows. Plus it looks complicated to get all the right tcl/tk
>packages.
>- Viking: didn't work. Maybe my tcl/tk installation is broken.
>- 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.
>- 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.
>- ExpertGPS: fast, seems to most of what I want (no useful overlays
>though), but $70 is a lot to spend on a tool that provides lots of
>features I can't use/don't want, like live GPS tracking
>
>So, maybe I'll use ExpertGPS till the evaluation period runs out,
>still looking for other good solutions though. Have I missed any?
>
>Steve

Have you looked at GPX Edit? It's free. I haven't tried to do all the 
things you are wanting to do, but it does allow you to open multiple 
tracks, bind tracks, cut tracks, delete track segments and waypoints, 
delete all inside or outside a box, add points, overlay on Google maps. It 
might be worth a look. No automated simplification, though, and I don't 
know how well the binding works, I've only used it with single tracks.

-- 
Randy