POI File Size

on the amount of additional memeory you have on your unit.

My question was not based on having a limit to the storage space. The .poi file would be initially saved on my PC hard drive which has more that ample space for the created file. My question was simply how large would the .poi file be?

I imagine that Miss POI or someone else can give you a figure on how large all of the POI files are. But since there isn't a 1:1 relationship between the size of a POI source file and a final poi.gpi file, that would not really answer your question. For the end user it would make no sense at all to load all of the POI files into your GPS. Even if we ignore the question of should east coast residents need or want all of the Seattle Starbuck's locations in their GPS (even many that will very soon be closed), there are just so many POIs that are only of interest to certain groups. If you're not a ham radio operator then you don't need or want the ham radio repeater POIS. There are many different POI files for churches or temples or covens or whatever of various religions. While some people might want that for their own religious beliefs, it's hard to imagine any legitimate reason that people would want the POIs for all of the different religions on their GPS.

And there is the issue of many of the POIs being duplicated, either state by state files as well as national files, or CSV files and gpx files of the same data.

So unless you take on this project, download everything and then install it, I doubt that we will ever have the answer to this question.

And the files will continue to grow as more and more people upload their own POIs

All of the files would create a POI file of about 10GB, plus or minus 9.99GB.

GadgetGuy2008, your comment made me chuckle...

Frovingslosh, when I first signed up for POIFactory, one question I asked was whether or not it was more logical to have regional POI's for the reasons mentioned in your reply. Although some POI files are regional by content/design, many are US files by content/design. My logic for regional, like yours, was based on thinking I might want to have all POI data for a given region of the US.

What prompted THIS posting question was after having exercised the Garmin POI loader on about a dozen donloaded about 2 dozen POI files, I noted that the .POI file created by the loader was very small. This made me wonder what be the file size created from a download ALL poi files (assuming the POI loader would allow this to happen).

POIs are indeed small, but there may be side effects from having POIs that you will never use in your GPS. One apparent one is that searching POIs seems to slow down the more that you have in the gps.

I do load some national POI files, but would choose to do something different if the data was better organized and more consistently labeled. I do think keeping all of the data for a national chain in one place rather than 50 or more smaller files makes sense (and keeping more than one copy of the data makes no sense at all from a maintenance standpoint). I wish I could just extract the States that I was interested in from a national POI file with a utility like GREP, but lack of a consistent way to label States and some POIs that omit State information completely make this unrealistic. And even if we could get people to use consistent labels for States, a free GREP utility would only work for CSV files, doing this for the richer GPX files would only turn into an advertisement for paid software.

It is a simple matter to extract the needed cells in a CSV file based on the lat and lon of a confined region. All you need to do is determine the approximate lat and lon boundries of the region you want and then sort by column a and b then copy and paste the selected range of cells to a new file.

And you feel that this is easier than if everyone just used a 2 letter postal code that one could grep on? I certainly don't, at least not for states that are not rectangular in shape. And, of course, it completely fails again when talking about GPX files, where you currently need a non-free program to deal with the more complex XML file format, and can't be so easily sorted.

Actually, if I were going to go after the data based on Lat and Long, I think I would go ahead and come up with an approach that let me search the POIs based on a distance from a central point (or more than one central point). It shouldn't be too hard to do the math to figure out how far each POI is from a "home" location (after all, we do have computers) and select only the ones that are within some specified distance (perhaps 300 miles, although it would be the user's choice). That would get around completely any state boundary issues and should give more useful information than selecting POIs based on rectangular rather than circular searches. I'm not motivated to do this though because it would be much more complex for GPX files than CSV files, and I can't see writing it for only the lower quality CSV files.

I sort ALL the POI files I use by opening with Works and then sorting the longitude column - eliminating everything West (or East) of my intended travel area
and then sorting the latitude and eliminating every North (or South) of my intended travel area.
Since I use .csv files exclusively I don't have any problems. I even use POI Verifier II to sort out individual state locations.
Just my simple approach to a simple problem for me.

Good point!

Again not that I'm wanting to do the entire POI data base load, but if I did, knowing the how large the .poi file created by the Garmin POI Loader would be is one way to estimate the needed capacity of my SD card. E.g., if the .poi file size for a full load is 1.2 GB, then I would be OK with a 0.5 GB card if I'm thinking I'd only load about 40% of the POI files.. (per the ratio..)

The SD card has a lot of other uses besides holding the GPI files. You can load the POI source CSV files to it, put them in a directory and then use POI loader to compile the contents of that file into the GPI file stored on the card. The card can be used to store music and photos as well, but the NUVI is not a real good display for slide shows.

There are many threads about backing up the files from your NUVI as well, and the card makes a good storage device to hold them. An with literally gigabytes of storage for less than $20, why limit the size to something that may have to be replaced later?