POI Download to PC

You need to place POI's in a folder on your PC. When the POI Loader ask where to load from, you point it to this folder. The POI Loader won't get to this point until it recognizes your GPS.

Tetyson, before seeing your response I inserted a USB drive in the slot and the POI loader did allow me to then choose this device (or instead another directory location on my PC). Nonetheless, my NEW problem is that the new folder on my USB drive has no .csv or .gpz files in it so the POI loader will not let me add files to this empty directory. So I'm trying to find a file to "make the program happy".

POI Loader from Garmin let you to put your custom POIs on your GPSr. Once you download the program from Garmin, run the program to install it on to the PC. Attach your GPSr to your PC using a USB cable. The PC (Windows 2000 and up)would recognize your GPSr as a storage device. Run POI Loader, and you should be able to load your custom POIs on to your GPSr.

Once I installed the POI loader, all I do is connect the GPS via USB. The loader has to find your GPS in order to work. Just tell it where the files are, and download them. If you want to add, delete, or edit any POIs. Just do that in the directory on the PC, then load them back into the GPS. It will overwrite whatever it already on the GPS. I always use "manual" mode, so I can allocate what I want as alerts. Works like a charm.

So, let's go step by step.

Download and install POI Loader to your computer. (which you appear to have successfully done).

Create a folder on your computer for all your POI files.

Download and/or create Custom POI files (either CSV or GPX file) and place them in the folder on your computer.

Attach your GPS unit to your computer with a USB cable. (Alternately, if you have a unit that will read the Custom POIs from the SD card, attach or insert the SD card to the computer.)

Run POI Loader.

Point POI Loader to your GPS unit (or SD card) as the destination for the Custom POIs.

Point POI Loader to the folder you created on your computer as the source of the data.

Select Manual or Express Mode.

Follow the prompts.

POI Loader will create a file named POI.GPI with all your Custom POIs.

Was about to respond to my own message that I thought I had just asked a dumb guestion.. Your response, Mariner, confirms my suspicion. So the POI loader loads the POI's from my PC to my GPS. I guess the only missing piece is getting specific POI files onto my PC from the web. The specific POI files would be the ones for certain "points of interest". Jump in anyone and clue me in... (and save me the time to eventually figure it out for myself..)

I was browsing files on this site but have not yet figured out how to get only the ones which are for my "point of interest". Specifically, can one get all POI files, categorized by type, for a specific city/state? Or instead, does one page through and look over each file, section by section, type by type?

Just download whatever POIs that you may find useful and save them in a folder on your PC. Run POI Loader and point it to the POI folder.

A item by item, page by page approcach seems to me like an inefficient process...

See Motorcycle Mama's comments above, she had clearly stated the steps in loading POIs to your GPSr.

Mariner, I'm not hung up on process. I don't need the steps. If you look about 5 or 6 posts above, you will see that I realized that my question was a dumb question immediatly after my post. My only issue is in finding POI's for my "point of interest" without having to page through numerous item-by-item POI's until finding something that might be of interest. I'm not into the grab-bag approach of finding POIs. I'm more for an organized approach...

The POI files are broken down by categories and that makes it pretty easy to determine wether that interests you or not. If you have a better way to do it, you can always make a suggestion to the owners of the site, Miss POI and JM

Beside being in categories, you can also do a search of the site for subject words that might interest you.

Unfortunately there is no "Grandad-2003" category with all your particular interests since the people of this site do not know you. Therefore, you have to find your own POIs.

PT

Maybe I'm on the wrong page but I was thinking that if someone wanted to do a POI search, they would first search their "points of interest" by first LOCATION, not by category. After all, this is a GPS device which first and foremost works off of location. So if one were wanting to make a trip to someplace then one would first do a search for POI's for THAT LOCATION. Then after finding all POI's for that location, a POI CATEGORIZATION would be the best way to determine which POI's are of interest (categorically speaking). I'm confused as to why POI's in a location far from where I am LOCATED (or will be located) are of interest to me.

You can look at the POI files on the site in many ways.

By category ...
http://www.poi-factory.com/poifiles

By metro area ...
http://www.poi-factory.com/poifiles/metro-areas

By alphabetical listing ...
http://www.poi-factory.com/poifiles/alpha

Or by searching by keyword ...
http://www.poi-factory.com/search/node/

Many of the POI files here encompass the whole country and thus are not broken down by location on the list. Also, many people download files based upon the things in which they are interested.

Because Custom POI tend to be categories of subjects or things that go together and people want to find those things no matter where they are. And Custom POI tend to have subjects specifically for what you are interested in rather than a collection of things not related other than distance.

For example, say you are a Dunkin Donuts junkie. Now you could go into your GPS, pull up the normal Food category then search for a Dunkins near where you are. Kind of tedious. Instead you are traveling through several states and you just need that Dunkin coffee every hour and NO, you do not care about anyone else's coffee, so you pull up your Dunkin Donuts Custom POI list and now the GPS ONLY shows you those DD locations near where you are driving (which may be far from home and you would probably know all the ones near home anyway).

Or maybe you are Ham operator with a mobile unit and you have one of those ridiculously long antennas on your car and some other Ham nuts put together a custom POI list of all the low clearance overpasses (or parking garages or tunnels, etc.). You can now have it show you where those are because you, again, may be in another state and want to know before you whack the one off your car.

In addition to setting up these Custom POI files, another thing you can do with Custom POIs is set up alerts so that when you get near one, the GPS will alert you about it. Again this is useful for people who are looking for specific things in areas they may not be familiar with and need to find that Dunkins or low overpass two states away on a road they are traveling the first time ever.

If you want to just find generic POI by category where ever you happen to be and just want to see a range of things, then use the POIs already built into the GPS and you can easily search for entertainment, food, etc. based on what is near by. But if you are a, for example again, a Flea Market junkie, then that custom Flea Market POI file is going to tell you when you are near a Flea market since you might not be in an area you are familiar with.

Dig?

PT

You can always edit pre-made POI's and manipulate them to your locale.

On another related note, you've spent so much time debating the way things are done here, you could have downloaded 40% of the files on here by now......my 2 cents.

Walleye1, already had done the downloads of interest. I was only looking for helpful comments related to the best way to find POI's. A forum is supposed to be helpful to the users. Your "you've spent so much time debating the way things are done here, your could have downloaded 40% of the files on here by now" seems a bit too critical to me. When I respond to comments in other forums I make a point to not criticize anyone. I believe you should keep your 2 cents in your pocket if your commentary is going to be a criticism of others. I don't think that is what the forum is all about. Perhaps we should ask those in charge if this is what they intended..

We've all tried to be patient and answer your questions. Obviously not to your level.

You may want to look at this thread:

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/8325

Let's play nice boys and girls, Miss POI is watching you.

Miss POI

Yes, please lets have fun instead!! By the way, I am trying to find McDonlads and Burger king fast food for CT, does anyone know? because the ones that are here are for out of state. However, I was wondering if any other way to look for them, Thank you much.

The Area link above is great. I did not realize that we could do that and it helped greatly with the Phoenix area that I needed.

Thanks for posting it.

This, like all forums, is about exchanging useful information. Never a need to be nasty but sometimes a little constructive criticism IS useful. (Maybe that should be "can be useful".)

You mentioned effeiciency. The POI files are created with efficiency in mind. They are either a collection of ALL of a certain thing over a WIDE area or,usually by city, a list of various commonly interesting things in that location only.

This is the most efficient way to create and USE POI files. It would be grossly inefficient to have to load NEW POI files every time you set out for a different destination, don't you think??

Thanks for sharing the information it helped me get past a stumbling block of my own. They loaded very easily on my SD card. On. I did not want to use up the space on Garmin although it has plenty of room. One other question “why do you have to download PIO Loader every time you want to add a PIO file”. It takes a little time to do this each time. One of the files I loaded “24 Hour Pharmacies_Charlotte Area” gave me an error message before PIO Loader completed the download to my SD Card which stated “There is a data format error on line 10 of file C:\PIO Factory\24 hour Pharmacies Charlotte Area.csv. The data earlier in the file will be written but no more data can be read from the file.” Does this mean I have lost part of the data from the file. Another question I notice that some of the downloads are in zip format can they be saved as .csv or .gpx before downloading to Garmin? Any way thanks a million for your insight on getting out of this bind I was in before your post.

C N Parrish

Check line 10 make sure there is no 2 double quotes or extra unnecessary comma.

POI Loader will read both .csv or .gpx files.

I checked out the file and there was (," ") at the end of line 10. Remove those characters and it should correct the problem.

I'm very new to forum, so if you can tell me how I can make the corrections I would apprecaite greatly. Step by step instructions would be great. Thanks in advance for your assistance.

C N Parrish

The problem with line 10 of 24Hr Pharmacy - Charlotte area_V.csv , as found by POI Verifier, is "incorrect latitude in line 10". The longitude and latitude do not have a comma separating them; so the latitude in line 10 is seen as "Walgreens Pharmacy" (the second column).

RT

Just open the file with notepad, find line 10, and insert a comma between the longitude and latitude at such:
make -80.72021935.122043
look like:
-80.720219,35.122043

You may also want to remove the number 24 from the file name as it may cause an unwanted alert.

RT

When I open the file in NotePad and make the correction how do I save it. It only let's me save it as a txt file. How do I convert it back to csv? Help..

C N Parrish

If you open a csv file in Notepad and save it, it will save as a csv file.

I corrected the file and sent it to Miss POI. She'll probably have it posted shortly.

RT

MM right on the money I'm glad see's back with us...

Please explain what's backwards??? Did you post in the wrong thread; or can we blame your post on too much 'New Years Eve'??

RT

Just click the red X to close Notepad and it will prompt you to save it. Answer Yes and it will save using the original file name and extension.

Thanks RT, I have that loaded now.

Miss POI