when updating POI's

POI Loader will overwrite the file in your folders. If you have a folder called Donut Shops, it will create a new gpi file called Donut Shops.gpi, with any updated files.

In my case, I have a folder called Vacation that I created as the first folder created. Any POIs in this folder will show up at the top of my POI file list. When I come back from my vacation, I will delete Vacation.gpi, but leave ghe folder untouched. That's because I no longer need to see the vacation POIs, until the next vacation.

There really is not a pat answer to such a question because there are too many variables - too many different ways to approach the updating process.

You say that you have quite a few POIs from this site that you have loaded and that you have two Garmins. Already we have variables. For example, did you download all the of the POIs at one time and into one folder and then do two identical runs of POI Loader - one after the other for each device? Probably not.

It used to be that POI Loader created one and only one file on a device and that was a poi.gpi file. Every time it ran, it created a file called poi.gpi - meaning that it overwrote that file every time. So there was no problem with versions of POIs on the device - there was only one file.

Then, it was discovered that there was nothing wrong with going into the device while attached to your computer and renaming the poi.gpi file to something else - maybe vacations.gpi. Then you could load another batch of POI files wherein POI Loader would create its poi.gpi file which you could rename to, say, camera.gpi. It was up to you to keep track of which files were in what .gpi file.

Then POI Loader was changed to let you name the file it created. So, now you could point POI Loader to your computer's Vacation folder and load, say, Hampton Inns, Offbeat Attractions, AAA locations, etc and create a specific file. POI Loader defaulted to the name of the folder you pointed it to, but you could have named the file FloridaVacation, instead of the Vacation default.

So POI Loader could now create multiple .gpi files on its own.

You can do runs with POI Loader in Express mode to add POIs that do not need an alert (but let me quickly point out that the poi-factory camera files are loaded in express mode because the alert is handled by the files themselves).

Many of us do a load of the RestAreas file in manual mode so that we can set a proximity distance of, say, 5000 feet. Doing such results in multiple files on the device.

Looking at the computer side, the question comes down to whether the files in your (I think) one folder are all current. Only you can determine that. Remember the camera files change every week.

So, I would suggest you click on the My Favorite Files link that you will find as the second entry under your name in the upper right hand pane of this page (hold down the Ctrl key to get a new tab and leave this page open). Remove any files that you no longer want from the Favorites list and see which ones need to be downloaded anew. I will comment that I use POISync to do my downloads but that is beyond the scope of this post.

You do not need to (but might want to) delete the current POI Folder on your computer. You only need to make sure that the files the folder contains are current.

I do suggest that you use POI Loader to delete all of the POI files on the device - just so that you start with a clean slate. Look at Understanding POI Loader Screens found at
http://www.poi-factory.com/node/44131