Waypoint Categories

The way Basecamp deals with categories has changed in numerous ways over the last year or so. The latest way is I believe what will be the final version, but who knows.

At the moment you can assign categories to waypoints and those categories transfer across when you send them to your nuvi (at least they do on mine) and are also sent to BC if you copy waypoints from your nuvi into BC.

However at the moment there is no easy way in BC to list all waypoints in a particular category. That may or may not be in the pipeline.

All you can do at the moment is to create folders and lists within folders and manually move waypoints into the appropriate lists.

Thanks for the prompt reply SUSSAMB.

That seems crazy, so the perfect functionality to view and manage waypoints and categories was there eventually through years of development and then another year or so later Garmin decided to remove it, how is that an improvement? I suppose that's progress for you.

There is no way I am going to sit there for hours tying to put each of my 600+ Waypoints into different lists/folders, it will take forever. Surely this must cause loads of people problems as I cant be the only person suffering with this issue?

Is there perhaps a way to download and install a previous version of BC that did support this method of importing waypoints into Category folders? At least then I can export the entire My Collection folder, uninstall the old version of BC, re-install the latest version of BC and finally import the My Collection Folder back in again.

Actually, here is the link which refers to version 3.3.0.2 which brings this feature to BC for the first time https://forums.garmin.com/showthread.php?24413-BaseCamp-3-3-0-2-Beta-is-available&p=116147#post116147 perhaps this is the version to go for?

Thanks.

Richard.

That seems crazy, so the perfect functionality to view and manage waypoints and categories was there eventually through years of development and then another year or so later Garmin decided to remove it, how is that an improvement? I suppose that's progress for you.

Well the problem was while it suited some it didn't suit others and there were many complaints. BC is now moving towards a system which is more akin to the old MapSource in the way categories are handled. What you could do is download MapSource and use that to organise your lists/categories.

Richard,

The only way to see the waypoints by category in BaseCamp is to separate them into separate folder/lists.
If you are moving from Mapsource to BaseCamp there is a fairly easy method to achieve this. Open two instances of Mapsource. In the first instance open your waypoints file and sort by the first category you want to separate. Highlight all the waypoints and copy & paste to the second instance of Mapsource. Then save this file as a GPX file named for the category. You can then import this file into a list in Basecamp also named for the category. Repeat for each of your categories. I did this with 60+ categories and it took less than an hour.

I find the new method to be a big improvement over using the list names as categories. The reason being is that when sending a waypoint to my device it would create a new category on the devise for every list the waypoint was listed in in BaseCamp. Since I do a lot of custom routing and often have the same waypoint in multiple lists it was cluttering up my device something awful.

It's not even necessary to do that. You can copy/paste directly between MapSource and Basecamp.

Thanks, I will give that a try later today.

I don't know how or if Garmin pickup on these kind of threads on this form to include possible idea's for future versions of BC, but having a play around with BC last night I came up with an idea which would be both useful and probably easy to implement.

When you click on a list to view all your waypoints in that list, then if you switch the view so that your waypoints are on the right (larger window) you can see various columns containing info on each waypoint. If there was a column called 'Category' in this view and you had the ability to sort by this column, it would make it fairly easy to manage the categories and see/edit at a glance what category each waypoint is in. Personally I only have 1 category assigned to any one Waypoint so it would be ideal for me.

Basecamp team are very active here, so any ideas are welcome and considered. While though I understand that your idea may work for you I think many others will have waypoints in multiple categories, so any search, sort, edit option would need to cope with waypoints assigned to more than one category.

You can sort the left hand lists by symbol so if you used a different symbol for each category and sort them that way.

I definitely prefer the current version for assigning categories, but I agree that it would be nice to have a few more management tools included.

We have on the road map at some point to be able to list waypoints by categories. I am not sure when this will take place, but it is on the list. We did the category system mostly because our devices use categories to sort waypoints. I will keep everyone posted as we improve this area.