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How do I select an area to download the birdeye images?

Former Member over 15 years ago

I'll be traveling through the state of Utah this summer. How do I download all relevant bridseye images?

The only way I found out so far is for me to devide the area up into pieces that are small enough for basecamp to digest. There has to be a smarter way to do this.:confused:

0 Former Member over 15 years ago

No, that is the only way. Awhile ago Garmin limited the max size of BirdsEye downloads. You will need to break up the area of interest into smaller sections and download all of them.

0 Former Member over 15 years ago

I am trying to understand why Garmin makes it very hard for us to use their software and the Birdseye service?

For now I assume Garmin's software design and development is capable to automate the download of larger sections of a map into smaller pieces and the current method is complicated and user unfriendly by design.

Services like Google Earth and Bing Maps show that it is completely possible to download large sections of detailed images. So I can only conclude that Garmin's service is of much smaller capacity, which could mean that by adding more users the quality of sevice will go further down.

Does that mean that to control the capacity Garmin chooses to make it very hard for us to download the data?

Garmin?

0 Former Member over 15 years ago

How do Bing and Google "make it easy to download large sections of detailed images"? AFAIK, they offer no way to directly send such images to your GPS. There are some unauthorized third party programs that will grab images from them, but this isn't something that they support. And do you really not know the difference between HUGE companies like Google and Microsoft vs Garmin?

I wish it was easier to download large areas with BirdsEye also, but honestly it isn't much of an issue for me. I have filled a 16GB card with the highest resolution imagery for a very large area myself; it works well and looks great.

The Garmin employees that participate here are programmers and don't determine policy for things like download sizes.

0 Former Member over 15 years ago

There is no difference in downloading images to display on screen as Google and Bing do and downloading them to store on connected storage as Basecamp does.

Of course it makes no sense for Garmin to build up its own datacenters to provide this kind of online service, which is why companies like Microsoft offer this to companies such as Garmin. This is completely scalable.

Anyway, if the current service has a limitation, the Basecamp application could do the tedious task to split a larger area into smaller and manage the download.