Talk:RoadMap

From VikingWiki

Writing location coordination to photos (exif)

Can you give us more details? I do not understand the relation between Viking and Photos?

Guyou 13:07, 19 February 2007 (PST)

Most high end dslr cameras can be connected to a gps and automatically record the coordination to the photo's exif header at the time it is taken. For other cameras, that can still be done afterwards by software. One method is matching time stamps of photos and track points. Viking can be a good visual tool for doing this and many other ways. From there we can do such things as

• Displaying photos I took in a selected area on the map.
• Copying/moving all photos I have taken on this track.
• (feel free to add more to the wish list here)

I don't think it's a good idea to add "Photo Manager" functionalities into Viking. That will make Viking far too big scopewise. I would prefer using an external application like gqview.

I use Viking mainly for my wanderings in the nature, from which I bring back only two "things": lots of photos and gps data. Can't help making Viking a good tool for handling them both.

--Qtonthat 20:06, 19 February 2007 (PST)

Displaying maps in any selected map mode from View menu.

I think this feature can be planned with the "scripts" feature planned for 0.4. In my mind, in order to allow scripts, we have to revise how "View modes" are implemented. As map sources, external plugins/scripts must be able to add "View mode" or interact with them.

--Guyou 13:11, 19 February 2007 (PST)

I think the view modes from the view menu is quite confusing for users and we should get rid of it if we can. When a user makes a wrong choice (from a list she/he has no idea what they are about) Viking just goes white which is quite scary to new users. Instead of the current view modes list we should offer a choice list of UTM/DDD/DMM/DMS. To do this, we will need to convert all the maps to one common mode before displaying.

Let's put some thought together on this.

--Qtonthat 21:17, 19 February 2007 (PST)

I also think View mode is a confusing thing.

In order to replace it I suggest to automatically switch into the mode needed by the upper Map layer. I imagine this is the simplest solution to avoid user's issues around view mode.

I had thought the same way, too. But I did not like the idea because it won't work the way I want if I overlay google transparent map on top of topo map (topo map won't display). But now you made me think about it again. Perhaps it's not that bad. At least it's not worse than what we have right now and we can avoid the confusing view modes. We may fall back to this if "common mode" method is too complicated.

--Qtonthat 04:39, 21 February 2007 (PST)

For a total suppression of the view mode, I think we probably have to be able to automatically modify map images, in order to project these images in a mode different from the native "mode" of the image. But I'm not really sure, as I actually not really understand all notions around geo-data.

--Guyou 13:49, 20 February 2007 (PST)

The reason "view modes" exist is because various map sources (Google, Old Google, Topozone, Expedia, etc.) use different projections (UTM, Mercator, etc.) Additionally, scanned maps may use different projections. Different projections vary widely, so since we are dealing with raster data and not vector data it would be impossible to overlay a google map and a topo map without skewing AND scaling one or the other. For instance, in UTM north is not necessary up on the map. It might still work OK if we use very-zoomed in maps for one or the other. This would take a lot of CPU power but we could cache the distorted map tiles. But under normal circumstances we want to see topo maps under UTM and Google mercator maps under a mercator projection.

The automatic map mode changing is a good idea, but there should definitely be a manual override so I can have many visible maps and switch between them easily, and also so a scanned map (as GeorefMapLayer) can use whatever projection is necessary for it.

--Vikingis 15:26, 21 February 2007 (PST)

Well explained. Thanks.

I think we should keep "view mode" and add something like "AutoViewmode" as default setting.

--Qtonthat 05:19, 23 February 2007 (PST)