POI's for certain areas of US only

POIs are pretty small, but unfortunately if you load enough of them it does matter, search times will take longer and you might even see other issues. It would be nice if there were some easy way to extract just a single state from a POI set (or repeat the process to get a few states), but unfortunately not all POI files include state information and when they do they don't always follow a consistent pattern like using the US postal code.

GPX files are very tricky to edit or take a subset of, since they are multiple line files in an xml format. But if you want to reduce a .csv file to a single state, and the state information is in the file in a consistent form, you should be able to break it out with a simple "grep" utility. This is a small program that will do a "pattern match" and output only the lines that match a seleted pattern and write them to another file. You should be able to find a free copy of grep with a simple Google search.

For example, if you wanted to extract just the Pennsylvania Starbucks from a National Starbucks file, you might type in the string:
grep PA starbucks.csv >pabucks.csv
to produce a file of only the lines that contain the upper case string "PA". Unfortunately, this will not catch lines where someone has input the state as "Pa." or "Pennsylvania" or even omitted the information completely, and sometimes all formats are even seen in the same POI file!

It would also be possible to write a program that extracted points within x miles of any given Latitude and Longitude, which might be both more useful than State by State data and avoid the issue of sloppy POI formatting. I don't know of any existing program that does this though.

You really don't see the Garmin POIs unless you zoom way in, generally any duplication is not an issue. There is no good way to avoid it either, you can't remove the built-in POIs, and you would not want the POIs here to exclude the internal POIs for several reasons.

For those who have 'POI Verifier II', there is a very easy way to 'pull' states POIs from a csv file. It's dependent only on the coordinates (which all POIs have) and has nothing to do with state abbreviations or zip codes. Unfortunately, the project was killed by those who complained about the meager $10, and the PayPal and .Net Framework requirement.

RT