Downloading POI"S

You did nothing wrong, that's the way POI Loader works. If for example you had previously loaded 3 POI files and sometime later loaded a 4th by itself, it will overwrite the previous 3 files.

The trick is that you have to load all 4 files at the same time.

There are methods to avoid this behavior discussed in other topics on the forum, but the very basic answer is "that's the way it works," reload all your POI files at the same time.

Loading POIs in the units memory vs. an SD card is a personal choice. Myself, I load the POIs into my 660's internal memory and put my mp3 music files on the SD card. Others here will do it differently. Either will work.

Nothing went wrong - that's the way it works. You can have only one poi.gpi file and everytime you run POI Loader it overwrites the existing file. What you need to do is copy all your POI to a folder on your computer and then everytime you add or change a file, you reload the entire batch.

It makes no difference to the unit if the poi.gpi file is on the unit or the SD card, it will run from either place, but again - only one file on one or the other - not both.

There are ways you can do this on the garmin. you can go into my computer and click on the garmin and laod the files like a memory stick . Don't mess with any of the other files you might erease a file and the you will say ohhh nooo what the h@## did I just do...

Well no, you can't just load files in with "my computer" and doing a file transfer, the POIloader has to be used for poi files to actually translate them into the final garmin format. However, once loaded by the POIloader you can go into "my computer" and find the Garmin nuvi, find the poi folder in the nuvi and rename the file that was just created named poi.gpx (if I remember the extension name properly, and I might not) to some other file name with the same extension, such as RedLights.gpx. then when you load more POI files your RedLights file will not be lost and will not need to be reloaded each time.

poi.gpi to redlight.gpi

Merry Christmas

For information on renaming the POI file, see:
http://www.poi-factory.com/node/16639
and
http://www.poi-factory.com/node/8779

RT

Actually, you can have multiple POI.gpi files on either or both the unit and the card -- two files of the same name just can't be in the same folder.

While I haven't tried having two files named POI.GPI with one internal and the other external, I am wondering how the unit would know which to reference when you went to Extras-Custom POI. I know about having GPI files with different names such as food.gpi and fuel.gpi, but I don't see how the processor in the unit would know the fuel locations were on the SD card in POI.GPI while food was internal on the POI.GPI.

Try it. What POIs you see in the unit actually has nothing to do with what the names of the files that they are in is. If you put your red light POIs in a folder call RedLight.poi and download it to the Garmin it will be in POI.gpi on the Garmin, but will still show up as in RedLights in the menu. If you rename poi.gpi to foobar.gpi the Garmin will still find the same POIs, they will still show up in the same place in the gps, and there will be no mention of foobar at all.

What the gps does is look at all poi files in it's internal memory and the external card and build the combined list of POIs.

Be aware though that if using the external SD card, the gps will want to offer to transfer those POIs to the internal memory. And if you let it, and the file on the card was the same as the file name in the gps (such as the defailt poi.gpi) then the internal POIs will be overwritten and lost. They don't get combined automatically if you let the gps do the transfer as one might hope.

You missed the point I was making. I already have a camera.gpi and a food.gpi, and a fuel.gpi. All these are available at the same time through Where To: Extras: Custom Poi. The point was if you could have two files with different information with the same name if one was on an SD card and the other was in the unit's internal memory.

I do not believe it is possible to have my camera data in a file called POI.GPI in the unit's internal memory AND a file called POI.GPI on the SD card containing food as an example and have the unit read both files. I do not think the software in the GPS can handle 2 files with exactly the same name containing different data in two accessible locations AT THE SAME TIME. I think the unit can only work with one POI.GPI file at any one time either internally or externally.

Try it. For me I was certainly able to have a poi.gpi on the SD card and another poi.gpi with completely different data on my nuvi 250 (4.2 software). It could see the different data in both files and let me at the combined set of POIs. The only issue is that annoying message to the effect that the POIs will not be available if the card is removed. do you want me to copy them to internal memory. I did it as a test and let it copy the data to the internal file, but that does not merge the SD data with the internal POI.gpi file, it overwrites it (just as if one had used POIloader to install a set of POIs internally).

I will accept your statement the unit is capable of handling two POI.GPI files at the same time and on different media.

They don't even have to be on different media -- just different folders. See the categorizing technique shown at the end of the thread: http://www.poi-factory.com/node/17095