route planner GPX

[Willem Bakker]

Unfortunately it's very expensive to provide it - analysing a long track uses alot of system resources up which affects other people using Walkhighlands at the same time; we're intending to make both the forum/trip reports and the rest of the site work faster and more reliably for everyone.

I'd like to know how much cpu's, memory, disk space and/or band width would be needed to restore this functionality. I really, really miss it and would consider providing you width the needed resources.

[digby]

A lot of the info in a gpx file from eg a garmin is irrelevant as far as seeing the trace on the route planner. File size can usually be dramatically reduced by stripping this out leaving just the lon lat and time data. Some way of doing this locally and inserting a key to allow uploading? The same key to allow uploading of previous route planner gpxs?

[Paul Webster]

To give you an idea, the external cost we've paid out for the GPS Planner/mapping server in total so far has been over £10,000. That is just the external costs of OS map license fees, and hosting and development costs paid to external contractors. There have also been months of in-house work time put into it, which if you price it in would be thousands more. There is no income from this at all.

Before we made the change, almost 90% of the map tiles downloaded were for outside Scotland, and 90% of the users of GPS planner visited it (for walks in Dartmoor, Derbyshire etc.) and no other part of Walkhighlands. Quite simply, as it is free, the more people who use GPS planner, the more it costs us and so the more money we lose through it. The change has meant that around 35% of GPS planner users are now actual Walkhighlands users, and a similar percentage of the mapping is actually in areas we do cover, which perhaps still isn't ideal but it does mean we are targetting our actual audience a bit better, and means we can continue to provide a service.

Whilst I appreciate you are disappointed, the change has put Walkhighlands in much better shape for the future.

As has been pointed out, companies including the Ordnance Survey itself provide subscription mapping services you can sign up for it you want that sort of service. It's not what Walkhighlands does, and we've no intention of setting up in competition for such a paid service - especially since as the OS also control our licensing costs.

[poppiesrara]

Interesting, Paul - thanks.

I'm probably quite close to the classic 'abuser' of this service (I did actually join up years back with very 'Scottish' intentions... but didn't quite realise then how much there was to do closer to home...), and use the GPS planner very freely and pretty much only for English & Welsh walks. I (and I'm sure many others) hadn't particularly realised that there was an incremental cost associated each time with doing so.

Counter-productively, the recent change actually makes me use the planner more (although I'm not sure that's so typical of anyone else and probably isn't worth much consideration) - a run through to plan a walk and see the distance/ascent involved and then, since that 'plan' can no longer just be saved and adjusted, sometimes another fresh 'plan' of the actual version before posting a walk report.

It's a terrific feature that I'm sure most would be loathe to lose. After the recent changes, are we now at a stage where continued usage at current levels shouldn't cause you further difficulties, or close to it being withdrawn altogether? If the latter, does anyone have thoughts on how to protect the service? It's interesting that many of the contributors to this thread are new or very infrequent posters (and - in Scottish terms - I'm much the same) which rather backs up the points you make.

[Paul Webster]

Oh, I wouldn't regard anyone as being an 'abuser' of the service - all are very welcome, it's up to us to work out what can be afforded and judge what we cannot really justify spending money on.

Probably the logical thing for us to have done would have been to have removed the English and Welsh maps... but then one of the best justifications for us having the GPS planner is it lets people writing walk reports illustrate them easily with a map, which is still a fairly unique feature (to do it legally, at least). I think the English and Welsh reports (including yours ) are a really great part of the community, so we've kept the E&W maps really to help with those.

Most of Walkhighlands' visitors to all parts of the website come from outside Scotland - which is a good thing, since the site is intended to promote Scotland and inspire people to want to come on holidays and trips here

One of weird things is that if you have the technical know how you can set up a similar site doing the same thing and you can use OS maps subscription free (and use the OS's map server for free as well) until you get to a certain level of popularity / number of visitors - which is probably why most people don't realize the costs. There are lots of sites using the free 'developer' or experimental OS model... then when their users recommend them, by doing so they are making it more likely that the website will reach the paying threshold and end up having to lose its maps - a bit of a trap for new sites. We moved to paying about 6 years ago.

We've no plans to make any more changes to the planner.

[poppiesrara]

Thanks for the response, Paul - that all sounds encouraging. And very grateful that you did leave in the E&W maps for us!

[ekso]

I understand the reason for not having the option of uploading gpx, but still feel upset
Bring it back please.

[37201xoIM]

At the risk of 'bumping' a very old thread and telling people something they already known, I've just found this site which is a good way of getting distance, climb etc. information from a GPX file, such as to help before uploading a walk report:
http://maplorer.com/view_gpx.html