[OSM-talk] Garmin Maps

Steve Bennett stevagewp at gmail.com
Sun May 16 03:13:18 BST 2010


On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 9:51 AM, Sami Dalouche <skoobi at free.fr> wrote:
> What I see is hundreds of small projects or individual people creating

...

> So, I am currently thinking of starting a complementary project to OSM

See the problem here? IMHO if you want to put some effort into this,
the best thing you could do would be to try and
unite/combine/link/organise all those "hundreds of small projects" -
rather than just start another one.

My experience has been that for part of the world, there is a
different project somewhere producing the maps you need. For example,
in australia, it's really easy:
http://www.osmaustralia.org/downloads.php

In the case of Garmin, complication seems to also arise from the fact
that earlier Garmins required special software (like Mapsource) to
load the maps onto the device. Newer ones (like my Oregon 550) are
trivial: simply download a .img file, and copy it into the right
directory.

So, I think there need to be more services of this kind: websites that
regularly (eg, every week or more often) generate .img files of a
given area, in a number of styles (eg, hiking, cycling, driving...)
There is already a central registry of these kinds of sites:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin/Download

But it could be improved.

Steve




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