Finding the latitude, longitude values for creating POIs

Thank you for this. Looks good!

thanks - tht's great. i saved it to my computer and also e-mailed the link to my 2 daughters

happy new year

That is a great tool, thanks for the effort. I have used Google Earth to find lat/long but this is much easier.

Thanks this will be useful. Any chance of having it display other formats? All my gps's are setup to display and input the coordinates in DDD MM.MMM format. Its not a big deal to convert but displaying the other formats would be handy

Steve

Thank you theRajah for putting this together. Looks like a very nice tool to have available!

What program are you using convert?

This is pretty cool and should be useful.

I use a small program called GPS Sway you can download at this site.

http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/tools/gpssway.php

There are a few websites that do the same thing as this program.

When I'm in a bind in the field I switch the GPS to use the format I need to convert. I enter this format create a waypoint in this format then change the GPS back to the normal format I use. The waypoint is converted to the format I use.

Steve

I am using Google Maps' API to draw the map as well as performing the forward and reverse geo-coding.

I'm pretty new to this stuff but it seems very odd that we can plug an address into our GPS devices in standard format and it can get us where we want to go but we have to go through the hassle of getting the longitude, latitude in order to do POIs. Shouldn't we just be able to provide the address? Anyway, I guess that's just the way it is at this stage of the game so my next question is do we have to look addresses up one by one on a website to get the coordinates or has someone developed some sort of batch process that can convert street addresses to longitude, latitude?

http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/geocoder/

Just putting addresses in the GPS doesn't really work, Garmin can be 1/4 mile or more off on some addresses. And POIs are designed to use coordinates.

One handy site that I found for getting coordinates is itouchmap.com/latlong . It uses Google maps, but give back the coordinates in a couple of very easy to copy and use forms. And the coordinates stay at what you looked up, they don't change as you move your mouse to copy them. In addition to the lat and long windows at the bottom of the page, there is a nice pop up balloon with one single coordinate pair string in it that can easily be copied for pasting somewhere else.

I should mention that the coordinates are in the order that the rest of the world uses, not Garmins backward coordinate order that has to be used for POIs. Once you paste the coordinates somewhere you can manually transpose them, but that is extra work and does add a chance to induce an error. I found that I could work with the coordinates in this format by pasting them into a text file with the rest of my data, and then process the text file into a csv file with a simple script. My text file originally had lat and long fields, but I added code to the script to allow me to input the coordinates in this format in reverse Garmin order and the script would find the comma and create the two fields based on the numbers before and after the comma. This complete addition took only one extra line of code in the script.

For some POI's I upload both to my Nuvi and 60CSX. The 60CSX is my hiking GPS. So I need actual coordinates instead of street address. The street addresses are not always correct. Also if you have the actual coordinates you can cross reference to topo maps a lot easier. I have a couple favorites where I adjusted to coordinates because it was closer to the POI location.

Steve

This is a nice tool to make necessary adjustments to incorrect address locations, as it is helpful to pinpoint any address via the satellite image.

Much appreciated!

Frovingslosh I tried itouchmaps last night and it is really quite good I like the map and streest part where you can look at the actual street. One thing I found wrong was when I put my home address in it put my house 3 houses north of where I live but then I found you can move down the street and get right in front. I found it easier than google earth for getting lot and lat's as like you said it holds still. Did make for working on a poi easier. Thanks.

You're welcome. You are correct, none of the mapping services, including google are particularly good on exact street addresses (my nuvi had been off by 1/4 mile or more). But if you are tweaking and know what you are looking at you can refine it quite nicely.

If you want to try my text file approach and want a script to process the file, I'll gladly provide mine. That way you can just cut and paste the coordinates into your file in Lat/Long format as they show up in the site, and the script takes care of getting them into the Long/Lat format that Garmin needs, less cutting and pasting and editing. (I did a batch of coordinates the other evening mostly one handed with just the mouse, cutting tyhe street address from my data into the itouchmaps site, looking up coordinates, copying them, and then pasting them back into my text file.)

Thanks I will send you a e-mail so you can send it. I have some poi's that I am working on and there are like 80 to 90 different stores and so far it has been slow.