Free utility to create tiled raster overlays for Colorado/Oregon/Dakota models

[leszekp]

You also might try posting a link to one of your overlays that doesn't work, and see if others have problems viewing them in their units. Don't have a compatible unit myself yet, so can't help you there.

[Boyd]

Here's a "gotcha" that you may not have considered. Do NOT use anything but letters and numbers in your filenames! I just spent the better part of an evening going nuts, re-doing a map over and over but had no luck getting it recognized by my Oregon. Then I saw a thread over on the Garmin support forum about this.

My file was named plains-2007.kmz and it is not recognized. I re-did the map with the exact same data and called it plains2007.kmz and it works! Now I know better than to call it something like plains&2007, but geez... you can't even use a minus sign? Also - it isn't just the name of the file itself. All the jpeg images inside your .kmz must also respect this convention.

But here's the strange thing... when I use globalmapper to make .kmz files, it inserts an underscore character into the name (such as plains2007_kmzA3.jpg). That doesn't seem to be a problem. Bug, or feature?  

[maps4gps]

http://extract.cr.usgs.gov/Website/distreq/RequestSummary.jsp?PR=0&CU=Native&ZX=-1.0&ZY=-1.0&ML=COM&MD=DL&AL=37.16289,37.1026,-89.30824,-89.37813&CS=250&PL=QDB02HZ,QBD02HZ,QCD02HZ,n1602HZ,p1602HZ,vd902HZ

The top two caused the problem.  I made a map for each of them and it did not work.

The third one down (whch had the entire area) works.

One of the test I ran was on a USGS DOQQ.  Worked fine, but a 80Mb it was at the limit of 100 tiles in the .kmz file.  Hires city data at 1' resolution also worked.

Looks like something is wrong in the request summary. 1m is 42Mb, however for the 0.5m there are two 211Mb files - would expect it to be 4 times 42, or about 168Mb.

Have you tried viewing the files in GlobalMapper or something similiar?

[jbensman]

I tried Boyd's Philadephia map that he made with globalmapper and it worked.  So it sounds like graster is doing something wrong. 

I was using "-" and spaces in file names.  So I tried it without them and it still did not work. 

[Boyd]

One of the test I ran was on a USGS DOQQ.  Worked fine, but a 80Mb it was at the limit of 100 tiles in the .kmz file.  Hires city data at 1' resolution also worked.

That's interesting. Try though I might, I have never made a custom map with globalmapper larger than about 36MB. This is with ~100 tiles at 1024x1024, both for USGS 24k topo's and NJ 2007 orthophotography.

So I wonder what's going on there? 80 MB sounds really large, perhaps the jpeq quality is 100%. You cannot adjust it using my globalmapper workflow, but my understanding is that it defaults to 80% quality.

[jbensman]

I noticed another problem with g-raster.  I was loading a file and it said it had too many files and it would  reduce the files to 100.  But it did not.  I get a warning message when start up the GPS if I have the file loaded.

[leszekp]

A few comments:

- It may be something odd about the exact format of jbensman's imagery that may be causing the problem. If you (jbensman) could send one of your bad KMZ files to somebody else to try on their Garmin, and concurrently get a high-res file created by G-Raster and known to work to try out on your system, that might help in figuring out what's going on.

- Didn't know about the problem with non-alphanumeric characters and spaces in filenames. Just released 1.5, and pulled it back to fix that issue. Oddly enough, like GlobalMapper, I'd been using "_" in the jpg filenames without any problems, but I've removed them from those files too just in case. Non-alphanumeric characters are now automatically pulled from all filenames. If that's the problem, the latest version should fix that.

- The problem with not resizing when the number of tiles is greater than 100 is driving me nuts - sometimes it shows up, other times it doesn't, and with the same image file. I'm working on it ...

- The default JPG quality factor for G-Raster is 80, which should result in a 100-JPG-tile filesize of roughly 35-40 MB or so. But I think maps4gps may have been talking about the original GeoTiff filesize, not the KMZ filesize.

[leszekp]

Oh, there is a new feature in G-Raster 1.5: it now accepts KMZ image overlay files as input. So you can calibrate a map larger than 1024 x 1024 in Google Earth as an image overlay, save it in KMZ format, then open it in G-Raster and have that large image chopped down into smaller tiles.

Couple of limitations:

- Image overlay can't be rotated, only stretched and translated. So it only works for images where up is North. If you have an image where up isn't north, you'll need to open it in a graphics editor, rotate it to fix that issue, then load it into Google Earth to create the overlay. Fortunately, most maps that will work as overlays do have "up" as North.

- For the unregistered version, images are cropped down to 1500 x 1500 pixels; the registered version allows up to 10,000 by 10,000 pixels.

[jbensman]

Thanks

I tired 1.5 and still does not work.  I have used data from multiple places so I do not think I just got some bad data.  I have tried IL and MO servers and multiple data types from the USGS server.

Is there someplace I can download and try a high resolution map made with G-raster that works?

I don't really want to upload a map on this site that does not work.  I do not see a way to remove a map once it has been posted.  Are there other places where I could upload a map I made that is causing problems. 

[Boyd]

On page one of this thread you indicated that you made working G-raster maps with USGS topo's.

I wonder if it could have something to do with your projection settings for the aerial imagery?

[jbensman]

Whenever I use G-raster, I have never been asked for the projection.

I have got graster to work with topo maps and 1 meter color photos.  I also got it to work on a landcover file from IL's website. 

[leszekp]

For GeoTiffs with full metadata, G-Raster doesn't need you to specify projection/datum. Only imagery with worldfiles needs that info.

I'm stumped. G-Raster works for lots of people, so I don't know why you're having these problems with high-res imagery.

[leszekp]

Version 1.6 out; now supports KMZ overlays with rotation (version 1.5 required that the overlay not be rotated, just moved or stretched).

http://moagu.freegeographytools.com/?page_id=155

[jbensman]

I tried the new version and got the same result: garbled map display.

The first time I ran it, the program crashed with an error message of Run time error 62 Input past end of file.  I started the program again and ran it on te same file.  It worked the second time (other than not working on my GPS).

Has anyone been able to get the program to work with a high resoluiton photo?  If so, can you upload a map somewhere so I can try it?

[leszekp]

Can you post the problematic file somewhere? I'd like to take a look at it.