MasterMaps

In my last blog post , we created a created a 500 km continuous line representing a ski route across Nordryggen in Norway. I need to transfer this route to my Garmin GPS so I can use it for navigation while skiing. How can it be done? Cross-country skiing in Skarvheimen, Norway. Photo: Bjørn Sandvik Open the route in QGIS , right click the layer and select "Save As...". Select " GPS eXchange Format [GPX] " as the format, and "WGS 84" as the coordinate reference system (CRS). I'm also skipping attribute creation as my line only contains coordinates. QGIS saves the line as a GPX route. You can import this route in Garmin BaseCamp  (File -> Import). Give the track a meaningful name. My 500 km route consists of 3867 points, but most Garmin GPS units are only capable of showing 250 points per route. You can get around this limitation by converting the route into a track . Right-click the route in Basecamp and select "Create Track fr...

I’m currently doing my last preparations for a 25 days skiing trip across Nordryggen in Norway. It will of course depend on weather, snow conditions and blisters, but hopefully the conditions will be bearable. Norway has a great network of 500 cabins maintained by the Norwegian Trekking Association . The longest connected cross country skiing track I’ve found is around 500 km, - how to map it? The map we're going to create with QGIS and CartoDB. Data from the Norwegian Mapping Authority . Nordryggen (“the north ridge”) is a fairly new name of the 1,700 km mountain range that runs through the Scandinavian Peninsula. My plan is to ski around 500 km in the southern part of Norway, most of it above the tree line. Cross-country skiing in Jotunheimen. Photo: Bjørn Sandvik You can study the waymarked ski routes on UT.no , or download the data from the Norwegian Mapping Authority if you want to map it yourself.  The dataset is available as a PostGIS dump or in S...

Previously, I’ve used three.js to create 3D terrain maps in the browser ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ). It worked great for smaller areas, but three.js doesn’t have built-in support for tiling and advanced LOD algorithms needed to render large terrains. So I decided to take Cesium for a spin. Cesium is a JavaScript library for creating 3D globes and 2D maps in the browser without a plugin. Like three.js, it uses WebGL for hardware-accelerated graphics. Cesium allows you to add your own terrain data, and this blog post will show you how. Impressed by the terrain rendering in @CesiumJS - with a 10m elevation model for Norway! Farewell Google Earth. pic.twitter.com/RQKvfu2hBb — Bjørn Sandvik (@thematicmapping) October 4, 2014 Compared to  the dying Google Earth plugin , it's quite complicated to get started with Cesium. The source code is well documented and the live coding Sandcastle is great, but there is a lack of tutorials  and my development slows down when ...

In my last blog post , I presented a new plugin, Leaflet.Photo , that allows you to display geotagged photos from any source. Among them was Google+ Photos and Picasa Web Albums API. My plan is to use this API for my travel map , and this is why. Does Picasa Web Albums still exist?  It's a bit messy these days. Google is trying to transition from Picasa Web Albums to Google+ Photos, as photos are the number one things that people want to share on social networks. When you use Picasa to share your albums ( Sync to Web ), the album URL is now on your Google+ profile, and not on Picasa Web Albums (which is just redirecting me to Google+). This is the URL to the public album from my trip to the Trollfjord : https://plus.google.com/photos/+BjørnSandvik/albums/6052628080819524545 It also works with your Google+ user id: https://plus.google.com/photos/118196887774002693676/albums/6052628080819524545 My public Google+ web album . The album contains both photos and videos....

Using Instagram for my real-time travel map had too many limitations, so I decided to use Google+ photos or Picasa Web Albums instead. I've create a new plugin, Leaflet.Photo , that allows you to add geotagged photos to your map, from any source. The plugin plays well with the great Leaflet.markercluster plugin, showing your photos in clusters. To make the plugin more versatile, it doesn't deal with AJAX loading or image presentation except the thumbnails on the map. Use your AJAX loader of choice, and simply pass on an array of photo objects to the plugin.  The photo objects can include the properties you like, but the following are required: lat: latitude of photo lng: longitude og photo thumbnail: url to thumbnail photo I've kept the squared thumbnails of Instagram, as I think it look nicer than variable size thumbnails. Since the photos can have any dimensions, I'm using a CSS technique to crop and center the thumbnails.  I've created t...

I take a lot of photos while trekking, and most of the time I'm also carrying a GPS with me. As my camera don't have a built-in GPS, my photos are not geotagged while shooting. Luckily, this is an easy task if you've kept your GPS logs from the trip.  I'm still very happy with my Garmin GPSmap 60CSx that I bought 7 years ago. By changing the setup, the GPS allows me to automatically save the tracks to the memory card. I get one GPX file for each day trekking named with the date. I can easily transfer these tracks to my computer or smartphone with a cable or a card reader.  Before I converted to Mac, I used GeoSetter to geotag my photos on Windows. Now, I want to do it on the command line using the great ExifTool by Phil Harvey. I installed it on my MacBook using Homebrew : brew install exiftool After copying my GPX file to the image folder, I'm simply running: exiftool -geotag=my.gpx ./ If you forgot to sync the camera and GPS time befor...

Last weekend, I had a great trip to scenic Lofoten and Vesterålen in Northern Norway. I brought my tracking gear to test my new real time travel map . How did it go? Our first trip was to Trollfjord , a 2 km long fjord with a narrow entrance and steep-sided mountains. It's a famous tourist spot in the Lofoten archipelago , but not many leave the boat at the fjord's end to hike up to the Trollfjord hut . The small Trollfjord hut. Trollfjord goes in an east-west direction, and I expected to be in the "satellite shadow" being far north and having steep mountains blocking the sky towards the south. My good old Garmin GPSmap 60CSx did well in the rugged landscape, while my satellite SPOT messenger  had some difficulties finding and sending positions.  Live track from my SPOT messenger ( interactive map ). GPS track from my Garmin GPS. The great thing of using CartoDB to sync my SPOT-data , is that you can edit your positions with ease after...