Route Line Thickness (and other Line-Visibility & Focus) Options
Not planned
Over time, it gets harder and harder to keep track of the route that you are currently working on. I've amassed hundreds, if not thousands of tracks and routes since I started using Gaia, but I've regularly wasted a not-insignificant amount of time, repeatedly, trying to find the route I'm working on again if I exit the editor to view or make changes to something else. There are a number of causes for this, including that the layer order is not configurable, and doesn't prioritize the newest creation date and/or edit dates, so older, overlapping content often buried the route, making it impossible to see or click on. If you have a lot of routes and/or tracks in an area, it's possible that, while no route follows the same line you are planning, sections of overlap can chain together until the newer route is fully buried. I end up having to make notes of the coordinates of known non-overlapping locations, then use those to be able to select the newer route and get back into the editor.
It is also difficult to see an overview of the route you're working on. You zoom out to check it and get a feel for where you went and where you're going, but with several lines of every distinct color littering the map, it leaves you with little to emphasize the new route over everything else. For me personally, the problem is even worse, because I use colored road lines in my custom map layers to be able to easily distinguish things like access restrictions, road length, road surface material, reported smoothness where available, functional classification, etc. It's like playing "Where's Waldo," haha, and no matter how distinct of a color you give the route you're planning, it's surprisingly difficult to spot it in the crowd (of lines), hahaha.
There are simple solutions that could be implemented to help with the issues described above. One of the simplest and one I'd like to have the most would be line thickness. I'd love to have the options to thicken all of the route and track lines, and you should also be able to pick individual route(s) to make it even more emphasized. You know how when you clock on a route, it gets a glow/halo around it, and all the other routes dim? I'd like to see a similar option that you can toggle for multiple routes. Those routes would not dim when a route is selected and would maintain emphasis whether selected or not. Again, with thickness, the glow is good, but if the route line also got appreciably wider when emphasized, it would be highly appreciated!
I'm currently planning a ≈3-week road trip, and something like I described above would be awesome for this. I want to break each day into a standalone route, but I'd also like to be able to easily visualize the entire route so far over the visual noise from the map layers and the other routes/tracks.
I often don't want to hide all the other routes and tracks, as some of them are not complete routes, but rather segments I've gathered across a region of known good or likely good routes I'd like to follow on a future trip through the region, so I want to see when still while planning, I just don't want them visually overpowering the route I'm currently working on, if that makes sense?
Related feature request: While it's nice that we can now show/hide individual routes/tracks, I have waaaay too many routes and tracks already to reasonably go through them one-by-one. I'd rather have to opposite option – something like the 'solo' button in most audio & video recording/editing software – where you can select any number of tracks and/or routes to display, but automatically hide all others, i.e. inclusionary, rather than exclusionary. Then there should be a single button you can press to remove all soloed lines and display them all as usual.
Any of these features would make complex planning so much easier! Oh, and one other potential option for making routes and lines stand out from the map layers – perhaps allow border colors. Then roads could be border-free, but routes & tracks could have a border, making them visually distinct (and also wider in the process). Sure, I could do the opposite now, and add border borders to the roads on my map layers, but there are far more roads than routes, and I think they'd just drown out the route lines more than ever, plus the roads would be even more susceptible to becoming blobs of overlap in higher-density areas.
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Hi there,
Thanks for using Gaia GPS.
I can definitely see how it would be helpful to be able to adjust line thickness and quickly hide all tracks but one.
We don't have plans for anything like this at the moment, but I do have an open request for this feature and I've added your vote.
Thanks for suggesting this. If you have any further questions, please contact Support here. -
What a great feature request!!
Without basic features like this, GaiaGPS would still be a good navigation tool... but as a GIS platform is basically a cute platform for non-serious amateurs... with these very simple features, it would become a solid and very user-friendly GIS platform for serious amateurs and light-weight professionals.
I don't really understand why GaiaGPS hasn't addressed these long-standing deficiencies.
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