When you have over 33,000 map related object, getting organized is a good idea. This is the way I decided to layout the OziExplorer related files on my navigation laptop.
First, you can tell OziExplorer where to look for maps (the images), and the meta data (the .map files). This is important because OziExplorer doesn’t seem to cross directory boundaries very well when doing things like moving the map in regards to your current (moving) location. Because of this, I decided to place all of the files I would normally be using while moving into the same directory. My main mapping directory looks like this:
icons
maps
maps_index
maps_regional
OZI_EVENTS
OZI_FEATURES
Ozi_Info
OZI_Names
OZI_POINTS
OZI_Projects
OZI_Routes
OZI_Tracks
OZI_WAYPOINTS
The above structure lets me split up my files by file types, and helps cut down on confusion. My maps directory is the main repository for the map images and meta data files for OziExplorer. It’s structure is like this:
for_import
map_images
ozi_map_files
Because I have all my map images in a single directory based on the map type, I needed a method of importing new images without losing the files in the large 20,000 file pond. To do this, I created a for_import directory that has a layout like this:
short_term_map_files
short_term_map_images
This lets me put the image files into the directory ‘short_term_map_images’. Next, I import the image files into OziExplorer which creates .map files which get placed into the directory ‘ozi_map_files’. Then, while the images are still in ‘short_term_map_images’ I change the pointers from the .map files to point to the destination where the image files WILL be.
Here is the layout of the map_images and ozi_map_files directories:
C:\MAPPING\maps\map_images>dir /B
100k
24k
250k
500k
OTHER
C:\MAPPING\maps\ozi_map_files>dir /B
100K_TOPO
24K_TOPO
250K_TOPO
500K_TOPO
OTHER
You can see I broke the files up into chunks based on map size. I figured that most of the times, I would be crossing map boundaries while looking at a particular map, and likely would not want to change map size (say move from a 24K to a 250K automatically). Consequently, it made sense to break out the .map files as well along the same lines to keep it simple to maintain.
For other suggestions about OziExplorer, check out the forum HERE.
A link with a step by step outline for scanning paper maps and calibrating them in OziExplorer HERE.
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