Removing the flags from routes and tracks - Viewranger in BaseCamp

I mate just prepared a route in Viewranger, and when I opened it the route wasn't visible for all the thousands of blue flags. I don't know off this was the way he created the route, or a "feature" of Viewranger. Either way, irritating to the point the route is pretty much unusable, and I've also seen routes like this created in Basecamp/Mapsource if the creator just rubber-bands the route.


The good news is you can get rid of the flags easily with the Javawa RTW tool

Removing the flags from routes and tracks

Can you save the route with the flags as a track, which should (I think) get rid of the flags. Then change the track back to a route.

This does work, I have just tried it. I guess what you are looking at is something like this:



I changed it into a track, which removed the flags:



I then changed the track back into a route. The flags had gone:



All the above done in BaseCamp on a Mac, with a few clicks of a mouse button. Garmin and BaseCamp really are shite!



Another idea, might be to open BaseCamp and go into route properties. Then change all the points from what I guess are announced via points, into unannounced shaping points. That might do it. Again, on a Mac, that is the work of seconds.

Just to be sure that the example shown above did work, I tried again with a more extreme set of flags, totally obscuring what lay beneath.

Flags blocking everything:



Converted from a route into a track:



And back into a route:



Flag free!

There is also an option when you create a route from the track in BC to say how many waypoints should be kept. I suggest keeping this to a minimum. Tracks create a lot of "flags" or breadcrumbs by default. Stripping at least a third of these out will not really affect the route as long as you are following roads and not forest tracks that wind all over the place.

The above were all of-road routes, in that the routes were so old that they no longer matched the underlying map of roads. You can see where the route sort of follows the road but off set from it by some way.

It shouldn’t, as the second example above shows, matter how many flags (the screen shot shows many hundreds) the route has. The track created from the route should have zero flags in it and there should be none when the track is changed back into a route.

Wapping said:

Just to be sure that the example shown above did work, I tried again with a more extreme set of flags, totally obscuring what lay beneath.

Flags blocking everything:

Converted from a route into a track:

And back into a route:

Flag free!

Click to expand...

Odd. I tried that first, and got a track full of flags! I wonder if its something unique to the way Viewranger creates routes

adventuredon said:

There is also an option when you create a route from the track in BC to say how many waypoints should be kept. I suggest keeping this to a minimum. Tracks create a lot of "flags" or breadcrumbs by default. Stripping at least a third of these out will not really affect the route as long as you are following roads and not forest tracks that wind all over the place.

Click to expand...

Yes, true, but the waypoints still have flags

Berin said:

Odd. I tried that first, and got a track full of flags! I wonder if its something unique to the way Viewranger creates routes

Click to expand...

I don’t know anything about Viewranger, I’m afraid. I think I see that it’s some sort of app for viewing and sharing GPX files? I think it might be the old problem whereby the third party (Viewranger) app’s route or track carries with it a lot of extraneous hidden data (in this case hundreds of via points, which display as flags) which BaseCamp is then forced to display. I don’t think it is so much a BaseCamp problem, as a Viewranger issue, though I can see that it’s a bugger if you want to view the route / track in BaseCamp and / or use the Garmin software to get it across to your GPS device.

I might suggest contacting Viewranger’s help desk to see if they can help? Reading the app’s blurb it looks like it’s targeted at bods who want to use their phone or Apple watch as a GPS device, which suggests it is not designed to transfer easily into BaseCamp per-se.I think we will see a lot more of this in the future as bods use their phones more and more as GPS devices on their bikes or run apps via their phones into fancy TFT screens but want to use BaseCamp as well. BaseCamp / Garmin and TomTom will eventually become an irrelevance to them. How many expensive phones will then get smashed (or apparently get vibrated, so they don’t work) or bods encounter Bluetooth pairing issues, we shall have to wait to see.

I have edited your title slightly and moved the thread. Richard.

PS I have sent you a PM offering to see if I can fix the problem from within BaseCamp, if you share the route with me. There again, if

The good news is you can get rid of the flags easily with the Javawa RTW tool

Click to expand...

works well, then you have an easy work around. Thank you for sharing it

Berlin has kindly shared the route with me.

It opened up in Pocket Earth on my iPad, with apparently no problems.



I really do suspect that behind that blue line, lies a load of hidden data, which BaseCamp then exposes. We shall see.....

Bingo! I have done it! All stand back in slack jawed admiration.

Please note, I am using a Mac and the latest edition of BaseCamp and Garmin maps. The process might be a little different on a PC, someone like Leedude could probably tell you. Here goes...

I imported Berlin’s file into BaseCamp where, as expected it opened up as an off-road route, with loads of flags:



As it is off-road and / or came from a third party piece of software (in this case Viewranger) it is in ‘Direct routing’ mode. I wondered what happened if I just changed it to Motorcycle routing’ mode. I then wished I hadn’t bothered:



Images like the one above often prompt the “BaseCamp is shite” response and bods stomp off in deep dudgeon. Safe in the belief that you can’t break anything, I simply switched it back to ‘Direct routing’ and at least was back to where I started from before I had started to fiddle. I then asked BaseCamp to convert Berlin’s direct mode route into a track, which it did in a flash:



I was though a bit disappointed to see that I still appeared to have lots of flags, which really shouldn’t be there. But then a light came on. I remembered that I had the original route file (with the flags) and the newly created track file in the same folder. By default, a Mac will display both at once. So I deleted the route file, leaving just the track file. Hallelujah! The flags, as I expected they should, had vanished:



One step in the right direction, the flags have gone. I then asked BaseCamp to create a route from the track. This it did but it took maybe a minute to do so. That is not surprising as there is a lot of data to process:



After twiddling my thumbs for the sixty or so seconds, BaseCamp delivered me up a ‘Motorcycle mode’ route with no flags. Job done and full marks to Garmin’s BaseCamp software, running on a Mac:



Here it is saved to Dropbox:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/kr2aqp0pq7kh1uv/Route for Berin.GPX?dl=0



If nothing else, it does show:

a) The problems of bringing third party routes into BaseCamp. GPX is very good but it’s not perfect. I very often see similar things when I download files from the German magazines. Sharing tracks (as opposed to routes) often helps but even that is not always perfect, as a conversion into a route still has to take place and personal preference settings (the curse of the GPS section and GPS device use in general) can often intervene. There again, tracks are fully useable on most GPS devices, so conversion is not always necessary, especially for off-road use. But if bods want turn by routing instructions, only a route will do.

b) BaseCamp is very powerful software, often more powerful than simpler app’s, like Viewranger. That though can create its own problems, as the mass of flags showed.

c) Operator error can creep in. I had forgotten (that’s operator error) that I had two files in one folder and that BaseCamp on a Mac will display them both if I highlight the folder, or singly if I highlight just one of the files within the folder.

d) Problems and challenges like these are often easiest solved if the file can be shared, as Berin kindly did with me.

e) There was no action that I undertook that could not be undone by using the ‘Undo’ command. If I really buggered anything up, I coujd just delete the file and import Berlin’s file again. A bit of patience, helped by a bit of knowledge as to what I thought should happen, was a big help.

Thanks for experimenting, Richard. I think i must have done the same as you and had the track (no flags) in the same folder as the route and so still saw flags.
I could have saved myself the faff with Javawa

Having taken a look now at various mapping apps, I'm coming round to the conclusion that Garmin still takes some beating.
The shareware options fade, as they always do, when the once enthusiastic originator gets bored/dies/finds he needs money to live on


If anyone want to use the track, BTW, its a relatively big bike friendly route round Salisbury plain


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Thank you.

It’s good when we have problems like this to deal with, not least as a successful outcome can help others when they come across the same thing.

From a quick look at the Viewranger app for iOS it seems designed for cycling, walking and hiking. These activities usually focus on height gain/loss so I’m wondering if some of the initial flags are not .gpx altitude “waypoints” - if so, perhaps there is a setting to inhibit them?

A question to the app’s creator, might answer that? Either way, we now know how to get rid of them, whatever they are.

Downloaded the file from the link and dropped it into basecamp on my pc, no problems at all Richard.

Thank you, Lee.