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county search


dlcak

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Eventually I would like to complete the Texas County challenge.  When I've sought out caches so far to complete this (usually secondary to another goal) I just look at a Texas county map and find a city in that county and kinda focus on that.  It would be a real PITA if I ever decide to strike out to one of the corners of the state to knock out the counties rather than a handful here or there.  Texas has 254 counties, btw. I think it would be neat to one day say I literally set foot in every county of Texas.  And would I do that without geocaching and this challenge?  Doubtful.

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While geocaching.com doesn't support counties directly, there are a few ways to skin the cat on this.

 

- The search page does not have a filter to search by county, but it does recognize counties as place names. Type in the county you want, and the search will return results starting from what it thinks the center point of that county is.

 

- If you are more of a visual searcher, use the browse map. It starts out at your home coordinates by default, but you can move it to different places or do location searches. The search bar also recognizes county names and will put you in the right area. For best results, use one of the map sources that support county borders. I prefer the Esri World Topo Map. Here's an example screen shot.

 

image.thumb.png.32f22d612a51f689de29bbbe91464afa.png

 

- A third option, not using geocaching.com, is to go to project-gc.com and use the Map Compare tool. project-gc does support searching by county, so this will show you a map with county lines and give you search results that are limited to the county you want.

 

For example, here is a map of all the active caches in Dukes County, Massachusetts, with the blue markers showing those you've already found and the red ones showing those you haven't.

 

image.thumb.png.8cafb1d692b0ef167d3ee43f564366ad.png

 

Or, if you're trying to see a map of Massachusetts that shows the total caches you've found in each county, that information would be available through your profile statistics on project-gc. Looks like you're only missing Nantucket.

 

image.png.88d440df3510ed9eac2072ccb1541755.png

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On 8/22/2020 at 7:08 PM, Keystone said:

County data is not kept directly on Geocaching.com.  You can use a third party API partner, such as GSAK or Project-GC.com.  Let us know if you'd like details about these options.

Isn’t that info embedded somewhere?  When you run the “my finds” PQ, that shows what counties you have finds in. 

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On 9/6/2020 at 8:27 PM, GrateBear said:

Isn’t that info embedded somewhere?  When you run the “my finds” PQ, that shows what counties you have finds in. 

 

County data does not come from the my finds query.   GS does not include persist the county a cache is in for geocaches.  Applications such as GSAK, ProjectGC and other can derive county data based on the lat/long coordinates for a cache.  Given a set of lat/long coordinates a reverse geocoding can return a list of place names (country, state, county, even city or address). County data is  not even  necessarily "embedded".  It could be looked up in real time.  

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On 9/6/2020 at 8:27 PM, GrateBear said:
On 8/22/2020 at 9:08 PM, Keystone said:

County data is not kept directly on Geocaching.com.  You can use a third party API partner, such as GSAK or Project-GC.com.  Let us know if you'd like details about these options.

Isn’t that info embedded somewhere?  When you run the “my finds” PQ, that shows what counties you have finds in. 

 

That's not how it works. County information does not show up at first; GSAK has to create it using their known set of polygons.

 

There are a few ways GSAK populates county information; for one, if you use FindStatGen,there is an option to update county information.

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I could not find it in GSAK but I did look at https://project-gc.com/Statistics/ProfileStats#Maps, then chose the province

Top 30 counties within region
Middlesex Middlesex: 1868 Hamilton Hamilton: 63 Perth Perth: 11
Elgin Elgin: 1292 Thunder Bay Thunder Bay: 59 Peterborough Peterborough: 11
Oxford Oxford: 353 Wellington Wellington: 58 Toronto Toronto: 10
Niagara Niagara: 255 Greater Sudbury / Grand Sudbury Greater Sudbury / Grand Sudbury: 53 Algoma Algoma: 10
Essex Essex: 183 Ottawa Ottawa: 39 Lanark Lanark: 9
Brant Brant: 111 Chatham-Kent Chatham-Kent: 35 Haliburton Haliburton: 7
Peel Peel: 101 Simcoe Simcoe: 33 Bruce Bruce: 7
Haldimand-Norfolk Haldimand-Norfolk: 100 Waterloo Waterloo: 32 Hastings Hastings: 6
Halton Halton: 73 Lambton Lambton: 26 Grey Grey: 4
Huron Huron: 71 Parry Sound Parry Sound: 15 Muskoka Muskoka: 4
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