GPSMAP 67 and ggz files

[+ru.beus]

Hey 

 

One guy from my geo-comunity thinking about by a GPSMAP 67 (or 65) and wants to know if GGZ files (gpx with photos) work with them?

[Moun10Bike]

Yes, GGZ files will work with those units. FYI, GGZ doesn't have anything to do with photos - it is essentially a zipped and indexed GPX file.

[+ru.beus]

41 minutes ago, Moun10Bike said:

Yes, GGZ files will work with those units. FYI, GGZ doesn't have anything to do with photos - it is essentially a zipped and indexed GPX file.

 

ah... ok.  So what is trick to get photos from logs on this device?

[Moun10Bike]

I don't have a good answer for that question as I don't do that. If I need to see photos, I'll use my phone instead. Way back when I used an application called Spoiler Sync to pull down relevant photos of interest, but it's been at least a decade since I used that.

[+SP3Q]

1 hour ago, Moun10Bike said:

Yes, GGZ files will work with those units. FYI, GGZ doesn't have anything to do with photos - it is essentially a zipped and indexed GPX file.

Did you upload GGZ files to GPSMAP67?
the documentation says that GGZ is no longer supported
https://www8.garmin.com/manuals/webhelp/GUID-5724F4C0-7557-4C51-BF07-54A567FA4600/EN-US/GUID-7A0A0748-A379-4FE5-9D3A-277C4B406A1E.html

BTW GGZ may contain a \Garmin\GeocachePhotos\ folder structure with photos
 

[Moun10Bike]

I don’t own a 67. However, I own a 66 that most definitely supports GGZ, and its manual also omits any reference to GGZ: https://www8.garmin.com/manuals/webhelp/gpsmap66i/EN-US/GUID-7A0A0748-A379-4FE5-9D3A-277C4B406A1E.html

[+SP3Q]

Were you able to import the photos of caches to the 66? Can you check if you have a \Garmin\GeocachePhotos\ folder and if you can display photos as a description for geocaches?

Edited November 25, 2023 by SP3Q

[Moun10Bike]

As I mentioned above, I use my phone if I want to see images for a cache and have never tried to figure out a way to port them to my 66. There is no \Garmin\GeocachePhotos\ folder in the GGZ files I generate using GSAK, and I'm not aware of a way to create one using that method. I'm sure you could manually add such a folder, but I'm not sure how you would properly access any images you put in it on the device.

[Moun10Bike]

This post from 10 years ago might have some relevant info for you: 

 

[+SP3Q]

If you would like to take some time to test, here is an instruction on how you can do it:

You can also take advantage of geocache photos on your Garmin handheld, JPEG only, need to be placed on the handheld’s mass storage in the following manner:
Photos
\Garmin\GeocachePhotos\Last Character\Second To Last Character\Full Code\

Spoiler Photos
<Photos Path>\Spoilers\

 

For example, photos for a geocache with code OXZTXGC would be placed under the path

\Garmin\GeocachePhotos\C\G\OXZTXGC\

And spoilers would be placed under

\Garmin\GeocachePhotos\C\G\OXZTXGC\Spoilers

If the geocache has only three characters total, a 0 (zero) is used for the second to last character. For example, photos for a geocache with code OXR would be placed under the path

\Garmin\GeocachePhotos\R\0\OXR\

[+SP3Q]

4 minutes ago, Moun10Bike said:

This post from 10 years ago might have some relevant info for you: 

 

Yes, I know this text, unfortunately I am at the stage of choosing Garmin and I would like to be sure that the new Garmins still support photo.

[+kunarion]

2 hours ago, SP3Q said:

Yes, I know this text, unfortunately I am at the stage of choosing Garmin and I would like to be sure that the new Garmins still support photo.

 

The GPSMAP 67 can display photos, but doesn't automatically load them.  You can add your own manually.

 

Here's a site that describes the features:

https://www.gpsrchive.com/GPSMAP/GPSMAP 67/

[+SP3Q]

I know that I have to upload the photos manually, but I would like to be sure (before purchasing) that GPSMAP 67 will be able to display them, like here:

[+kunarion]

8 hours ago, SP3Q said:

I know that I have to upload the photos manually, but I would like to be sure (before purchasing) that GPSMAP 67 will be able to display them, like here:

 

That's exactly like the Geocaching page in the link I posted.  So I'd say yes, it can display pictures.

[Moun10Bike]

I just used this GSAK macro and was able to successfully send and display cache images on my GPSMAP 66i as shown in the post immediately above. I can't guarantee that this means it will work on the 67, but I strongly suspect that it shares the same functionality.

[+SP3Q]

Taking advantage of Black Friday, I just ordered 67, in a few days I will see for myself whether 67 supports photos

Thank you very much for your help.

[+Mineral2]

It does support photos. It's just not an easy procedure. GPX files do not contain photos, which means when you download geocache information, either individually or via Pocket Query, there is not photo. You can use geocache managers (GSAK for windows, iCaching for Mac) to grab photos via the API, and these managers can load these images to your Garmin and associate them with geocaches. I've done this in the past, but it's not really that useful.

[robertlipe]

Photos aren't well supported in various software because Groundspeak doesn't make it easy to get a PQ that includes photos in any real way and getting access to the Groundspeak API to develop modern applications to survive the various API changes has been sub-awesome. So it's a pretty small pool of tools that even can do it.

Hopefully, few of us here will tell you how YOU want to go geocaching, but a couple of us with long tenures and plenty of experience are saying it's not worth the bother. If you have a cache (try something the GeoWoodstock event pages...) that has a zillion photos, it will take forever to scrape the photos and write them to your SD card but worse, when you're in the field and you load that page and that tiny little ARM processor starts to load, resize, and render a zillion images to a 240 x 400 screen, it will pretty much cough up its skull. So they're painful to get, painful to load, painful to display, and not really that useful while you're hunting.

Additionally, when we created GPX, we left it pretty loose how media might be associated with a GPX file. Unlike KMZ, for example, there's not a convenient way to associate additional files, like images or movies, with the GPX data itself. We left it open-ended whether they may be <img> or href targets or be resized or even how they might be named. So if you're putting images on an SD card that has to obey 8.3 filenames and start with 5 PQs that each have 1,000 images, it's up to the application generating the result to be sure that an image named "fire.jpg" or "IMG043.JPG" in files 1 and 3 each have to be stored and referenced correctly so now they're only somewhat independent. These are solvable problems, but it's just another peek into the sausage factory of how software gets made and one more reason that it can be frustrating. Oh, and there's an integrated photo viewer in some of the Garmins that gives you pan and zoom, but you have to jump through yet more hoops to get the photos into the right place/format to make them visible both withing the Geocaching "app" and the photo viewer. The Magellans that did this (the [567]10's from the early days of the Mio era) did all of this annoyingly differently, so if you were writing software to do this, that was another obstacle you had to justify at the time to see if it was even worth it.

The technical challenges exist and are all solvable. I spent some effort on automating this in the Palm/OS era when I was an active hunter and lots of logs had pictures and didn't consider it a break-even on effort. I'm with Mr. Bike above - if the last log is "the hiding spot has been compromised, so I put it 200 feet away at the location in the picture", I'll take the time to load it from cell.

[+Red90]

On 12/14/2023 at 12:38 AM, robertlipe said:

If the last log is "the hiding spot has been compromised, so I put it 200 feet away at the location in the picture", I'll take the time to load it from cell.

 

No.  It is time to log an SBA.