I’ve been looking for months to find a way to document and visualize currently about 4,500 days of travelling all over this rock, and I thought I had finally found my Holy Grail. UNTIL I just found a post from March last year saying that it’s not possible to remove all the waypoints from the visualization…
This would mean ending up with a very interesting but totally unreadable map because of all the markers. So I’m curious to whether this issue has ever been solved or that there would be a better way for me to skin this cat. Or maybe there’s a way to make markers see through or incredibly small or something?
To give you the idea of what I plan to do: I hoped to find a way to create a map per continent that shows all the routes I took. I’m unclear yet whether I want to add markers for highlights or my real destinations, but for sure I wouldn’t want to add any other markers that were simply used to select the correct road travelled, which is not always the most logical route using public transport.
I’m a bit unsure on what your data and your goal is. I’ll assume you have a large amount of route data (i.e. as .gpx-files or similar) and want to visualize that on a map.
The openrouteservice , especially the frontend client is meant to be used for planning single routes, not to visualize thousands of them.
That is not to say that you can’t use it for this, just that other tools are better suited for your application. From the top of my head, two approaches come to mind:
One would be to use something like QGIS, i.e. a geoinformation system designed to analyze spatial data like yours. These tools usually have very broad functionality, allowing you to graphically modify your visualization.
The other would be a more customized approach, using any programming library that provides spatial visualization, e.g. folium or leaflet and analyzing/visualizing your data with that.
I hope that answers your question, if not or if I misunderstood your intent, feel free to follow up
Best regards
The main “problem” indeed is that most great solutions are focussing on planning. I will have a thorough look at tour QGIS suggestion.
Re Folium and Leaflet, am I correct in thinking they wouldn’t be able to provide a route using a road but visualize connections between places as the crow flies? Or would I somehow be able to make them suggest what route I took between, say, Bogota and Medellin and then manually snap it to a slightly different road if I wanted to?
Since I’ve seen a few posts from others with similar visualization and/or printing questions I’ll post a link to a possible solution. Feel free to remove it if it’s not in line with ors rules:
to be honest, this reply added to my confusion on what your actual data looks like and what you want to visualize. Maybe you could clarify that for me, so we’re talking about the same thing
Both folium and leaflet are pure visualization libraries. If you want them to visualize any route, you have to provide that route by yourself, maybe via data you collected yourself or via a route generated by a routing engine.
Do you already have the routes (polylines) or do you have only the locations and would like to “connect” the points and display the route?
I am not sure if it is your case, but I had a similar need recently. I traveled during a year by bike and the route of my trip is being displayed here Eurasia bike tour | Sections | FAM.eco (scroll until you see the interactive map view - it might take a while to load ). Could you tell me if it is something like this that you need?
@jschnell I’ll try to be more explicit but the route map @amoncaldas linked to could be something I will end up with (nice trip by the way…).
So of all my travels I always kept route notes that would allow me later in life to recreate my routes travelled. I don’t have any coordinates but only an enormous file with daily starting place A and finishing place B. Sometimes I have added that we took a not very obvious deviation via C (as I’m exclusively using public transport).
All these places I would like to see connected, using the same roads that I used. Where they’re different I would somehow need to snap the suggested road to the one I really followed. I assume that for connecting my A to B via C I would need the routing capabilities of for instance ors. But I wouldn’t need actual planning information that comes with most tools like the road is currently blocked, what time I should leave, or how long it would take, etcetera.
Some routes I have done multiple times and I hope that wouldn’t cause problems, although I might need to use new layers for this. Like I visited China 11 times and some parts I have travelled 4-5 times. I could see a real planning engine struggle with this.
But that’s all there is to it, really. Hope this clears it up. A little
my suggestion would be to use our web client, to create your route, as you can set your known A,B,C points as start, end and via points, and go from there to recreate your route by dragging points from the calculated route until you have the expected result.
Please bear in mind that only 50 waypoints are allowed per route.
Then export the route to geojson and visualize all routes using QGIS , Folium & Leaflet or some other tool to your needs (without all the waypoints displayed).
You might need some time to get used to the tools, but once you know how, you will be able to create your travelling visualization
