Personal Track Heatmap


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By TallPaul on 03/01/24 at 1:44pm (last edited 05/01/24 at 10:46am)

As discussed on the thread about the new Track Heatmap and as suggest by Chris Mac we now have a first release of personal track heatmap available for supporters. Here's a screen shot showing you it in action for me and also illustrating where you can find it in the menu:

Some points to bear in mind:

  1. This is an overlay, not a layer, so you can view it overlaid on any of the available map layers, including OS and aerial photography. That's the plus side.

  2. On the down side, and as I suspected in the previous thread, this is very hard work for the browser especially if you have a lot of tracks uploaded (we have one user with 2,587 track uploads and 2,115,566 track points!). You will find that the app can become very sluggish in moving and zooming when this overlay is displayed. The best option is to select the area and zoom level first before you enable the overlay. I strongly recommend not even trying "2 maps" mode!

  3. Because it's an overlay so harder to distinguish from the underlying map tiles, and these are individual tracks not clusters, they are are displayed wider and bolder than on the common Track Heatmap layer so that they're more visible.

  4. You may notice some differences in your tracks, especially if you have a track which starts at home and then jumps to your start location. In the common Track Heatmap we filter out the initial part of the track but we're not doing that here yet. We think we can do that for personal track heatmaps but it needs some more work so we thought we'd do an initial release just to give you a flavour of it and get some feedback on what we've got so far.

  5. Tracks uploaded as part of walk reports are not included. Yet. (These are now included)

Anyway, we're very interested to see what you think of it.


By Lancashire Lad on 04/01/24 at 6:39pm (last edited 04/01/24 at 6:46pm)

Hello Paul,

I definitely prefer how the track showing on your “personal heatmap” example here appears slightly thicker, (more akin to how such tracks appear in Garmin Basecamp software), than the tracks on the “main” heatmap.

I noted your comment that tracks uploaded via walk reports are not yet included, and since all my track uploads have been specific to Walk Reports, (or so I thought), I did not expect to find any tracks at all on my “personal heatmap”.

However, I tried it “just in case”, and was surprised to see just one track of mine. (copied below).

However, having searched all my Walk Reports etc., there appears to be no Walk Report (or indeed any other reference to that particular track) on the WalkLakes website.

From my own records, I did that walk, (mainly to show a fellow walker how to get to the Priest Hole cave), on 13th June 2018.
Right clicking on the track itself, (when viewed on the heatmap overlay) doesn’t provide any information, so I am at a loss.
(I just can’t think of a reason why I would have uploaded a random track such as that without referencing it to a particular Walk Report or some other specific post I made at the time).

Best regards
Mike.


By TallPaul on 04/01/24 at 6:48pm

Hi Mike, I've just looked at the GPX and it is dated 13th June 2018 so that ties up. It looks like you uploaded it to our mapping app on 18th June 2018 ...


By Lancashire Lad on 04/01/24 at 7:06pm (last edited 04/01/24 at 7:07pm)

Thanks Paul,

I can't for the life of me think why I would have uploaded it directly to the mapping app - but from what you've said, I obviously did - so I must have had something in mind at the time.

I can only assume that old age senility has crept one step closer. - And it was already far too close to start with !!!! :shock: :oops:

Regards,
Mike.


By TallPaul on 05/01/24 at 10:47am (last edited 05/01/24 at 10:49am)

Hi Mike, I've now updated the software to pick up your walk report tracks.


By Lancashire Lad on 07/01/24 at 3:16pm (last edited 07/01/24 at 3:19pm)

Hello Paul,

(A slightly belated reply)

Many thanks for adding my tracks.

I've just had a look at "my heatmap" with the tracks all now being displayed, and I think it would be difficult to make it any better!

The width of the track lines is just right, and the bright red colour would be hard to beat in terms of standing out against the background map.

I can't think of anything at all that I would prefer to be different. - A super addition to the WalkLakes website!

Best regards,
Mike.


By Jandy on 05/01/24 at 4:15pm

This is great thanks! I appreciate it's a work in progress. I was going to try and construct something like this on Google My Maps so I could relive our time trekking the Wainwrights. So this is a nice bonus.

My overlay has some of out first walks and some our recent walks and some in the middle missing.

Also as I have uploaded files from my phone that contain perhaps three separate walks and there are a few long straight lines connecting them. This is most likely a symptom of my lack of knowledge on these things. And where I was just uploading to see were what our track looked like.

Any road my main observation quite a few missing :)

Regards


By TallPaul on 05/01/24 at 4:50pm (last edited 06/01/24 at 10:41am)

OK, there's two issues here.

Some walks in the middle missing

If you look in the "Your GPX uploads" option in menu can you see them there? If you can then can you give me the "Last Uploaded" date and time and "Started On" date of a couple of them? Then I can investigate.

If they're not in the list in "Your GPX uploads" then can you give me any dates on which you did the walks?

 

Three separate walks with long lines connecting them

This will be because they were all in one GPX file and, when you uploaded it, when it said:

This GPX file contains more than one track, possibly because you lost satellite reception, possibly because you used the GPS on more than one occasion without clearing the track log.
 
Do you want them joined together?

You left the checkbox checked ... so it did.

The checkbox is checked by default. This made sense in the early days as back then a lot of GPSs would lose signal under the trees and then start a new track when it could see the satellites again. Our Garmin Foretrex 101 (RIP) did that, a lot. So people wanted them all joined up into one track. I'm not convinced that makes sense any longer so I've now changed the default to be not to join them up.


By Jandy on 16/01/24 at 3:14pm

Hi, again :)

A selection of dates for those missing. All have the same upload & start dates which are 3/8/22, 4/8/22, 5/6/22, 13/2/22 (x2). these are all in walk reports.

Regarding joined up routes I did identify 2 walks that are joined by the 'straight line' and deleted them, in hope of erasing them from the heat overlay. This did not work they still appear. I have re uploaded them they have start dates of 1/8/20 and 26/6/20 and a last upload date of 16/1/24. Does erasing them not remove them from my 'records' ?

Thanks again for your great work ;)


By TallPaul on 16/01/24 at 9:00pm

OK, I've solved one of the issues: I believe that all your walk reports are now appearing.

I'm still investigating the "multi-track" tracks issue.


By Jandy on 17/01/24 at 11:53am

Yes thanks very much that works well now. I have found a couple of old track I have never uploaded and uploaded them. They are also picked up on the overlay - Brilliant!!


By TallPaul on 16/01/24 at 9:29pm (last edited 16/01/24 at 9:29pm)

OK, I have solved the "multi-track" track issue as well.

It's a bit crude but essentially if there's more than about a kilometre between track points on a track then it treats that as the start of a new track.

N.B. you will need to reload the map page as the app caches the heatmap.


By Jandy on 17/01/24 at 11:55am

Great that looks good as well - Fantastic!!

Now I have to convince the other half of Jandy to re-do some walks I did not record a track for, just to make the overlay cover all our exploits.....


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