Creating trails …

The Everytrail trails on this blog are presented as an overlay onto Google hybrid or sometimes terrain maps. The trails are recorded on the Garmin Oregon 450 (or Garmin nuvi 255T for road trips) and then uploaded to Everytrail using a plugin supplied by Garmin. This process, once the initial setup has been done, only takes a couple of minutes.

[NB The activity described in this paragraph is proving to be a bit problematic at the moment – either changes to Picasaweb, or Everytrail, are making the synchronisation described challenging … ie it’s not working.] I then load the pictures from the Lumix into Lightroom, do whatever editing is necessary, and then upload to Picasaweb (Google+ photos), create an album of the pictures I want to use, perhaps provide captions and then synchronise that album to the web. This creates an album in Picasaweb which is accessible from Everytrail but doesn’t need to be public – just accessible to anyone having the link. Back in Everytrail, I link the photos on Picasaweb with the trail I’ve uploaded and usually (as long as the time is synchronised correctly between the Garmin and the Lumix) the pictures are placed automatically in the correct location on the trail. I then provide a short description of the walk, provide some tags, and make the trail public.

The trails stored at Everytrail, require Flash for an inter-active experience, so I’ve chosen to use static maps on the blog and offer links back to the Everytrail map. This allows a route map to be shown which displays either photos or information about the trail. You can make a choice and change settings of the map by moving your cursor to the bottom of the map when a menu bar should appear. If you can’t see it – it means that you aren’t able to use Flash on your device – typically an Apple iOS device, or that you haven’t loaded the Flash plugin (available here) for your browser.

A major project was to map our NZ holiday onto Google Maps (look under Trips menu) – one for each days travel. I was then able to take the link of the map and feed it into GPS Visualizer using the Convert Form with the “Add DEM elevation data” selected “from best available source” to get a GPX trail, which I then uploaded into Everytrail. The next step was to place Picasa web photos against the maps in Everytrail – magic! In one instance I was able to use Everytrail to produce a map of photo locations from the GPS-coded data recorded with the pictures on the Lumix – magic!