Have Caltopo handle large numbers (10,000+) waypoints on a map.
GaiaGPS and Goat Maps allow for this. I guess it might go against the product vision of having every hike or rescue attempt be it's own map, but it has to be a fairly common use case for a trip to overlap with another one? I don't bother making "routes" to follow, I refer to previous waypoints and do some minimal research and then eyeball new terrain. :)
I opened an issue for this two years ago. It could just be a philosophical difference about how to handle trips, but I really like having all my historical waypoints for an area available. A 9-10 day backpacking trip in the Sierra will often pass through bits and pieces of many previous trips, and being able to see where I found campsites, crossed streams, or navigated around obstacles etc is very convenient. Trying to manually load up each trip as a separate map when I'm in the area sounds really tedious.
It looks like Caltopo tries to keep everything in memory at once, vs writing items to a cache and then loading them as necessary when in an area. It feels like a doable solution, and it'd have the bonus effect of improving performance in general even for more moderate datasets.
This is from last fall, but an idea of what I'm talking about (quick screen capture video of waypoints in an area, 35MB) https://drive.proton.me/urls/CJKEX1525W#bi85OLERoyCf
I'm fine having different regional maps - Sierra Nevada, PNW, Canadian Rockies, a few different zones in AZ & UT etc.
This is the one thing keeping me from hopping over from Gaia GPS.
Thanks!
(a previous thread about switching over https://help.caltopo.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/6295428552603-Some-questions-from-someone-thinking-of-hopping-over-from-GaiaGPS)
Comments
4 comments
bump :)
I agree with Carl. I have used Caltopo heavily for many (10?) years to plan and map my explorations that are mostly in Oregon by car, bike, ski, and hike. I have gathered lots of useful geographic information -- conditions of remote roads, whether campsites have reliable water sources for bike trips, spots too brushy to ski through, off-trail hiking waypoints, etc. etc. etc. I have it all nicely organized in folders with default set to not visible, but the Android app performance has slowed down and become a major problem. So then I split it into separate maps for types of trips (e.g. hiking vs. biking) -- but I'm constantly wanting to overlay information from some other map. This dataset organization/performance problem might force me to some other mapping tool.
You might consider using the print to mapsheet feature which is a new way to create overlays from map objects. This should load lots faster.
I imported 3k waypoints and the map was unpleasantly slow, I can’t imagine importing my full 19k. Creating mapsheets constantly before every backpacking trip and the moving new waypoints onto a ‘master map’ sounds pretty tedious when other applications like Gaia, Goatmaps, and iirc RIP Fatmaps are/were capable of simply handling tens of thousands of waypoints with no noticeable performance loss.
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