Originally Posted By: Joseph


If the same track is in a GPX file and a KML file, the GPX file will always be bigger.

Gmap4 converts GPX files to KML files before displaying the map (required by the Google Maps API)

Google has limits on the size of KML file that can be displayed. Those limits are:
Maximum fetched file size (raw KML, raw GeoRSS, or compressed KMZ) 3MB
Maximum uncompressed KML file size 10MB
Maximum number of Network Links 10
Maximum number of total document-wide features 1,000

1 GPS track is only 1 "feature".


thanks for this - I tried GPSBabel to convert my GPX to KML - my file in GPX was 1299kb, while in KML it exported to 18,200kb. Clearly, there's the problem why KML didn't work for me, because whatever preferences I used in GPS Babel (default), it was adding a ton of fluff. My GPX is stripped down from the originals, no time, no elevation data, so they are quite compact.

here's my actual entire JMT data from a freshly merged GPX with only the relevant location content from 22 days (GPX_Editor has great features to clean up those files). Only thing is the fat line width you can't control with GPX, but if you zoom in it gets better.

http://www.mappingsupport.com/p/gmap4.ph...ged.gpx&t=s
the muir trail track you found looks a lot like somebody took mytopo and drew a line following the published map trails, but those can be off by quite a bit.

Last edited by Fishmonger; 09/16/10 01:57 PM.
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