Comments on
California-Oregon-Washington
Special Quad Collections
Read and heed the following discussion. There are two methods of organizing the quads available in the archives--selecting the right one will save hours of downloading. If you intend to get your files on DVD, then it's not essential that you understand this (but still important in order to save space on your hard drive, if that's a concern).

Skip and Go To the Files List

Managing your collection of quads will not be simple. Your cataloging system, eg, how you will organize your files, how you will name your subdirectories, etc., should be optimized for ease of use, which to me means finding the map you want quickly or, if you have a map open, moving to an adjacent map easily. The solution I use is a tree structure shown in the following screen shot:

  • Maps [note: "maps" is in the root directory of the drive, not within the OziExplorer directory]
    |--Arizona
    |.....     |--1x2
    |.....     |--24K
    |.....     |...... |--31-111 Nogales W
    |.....     |...... |--31-112 Lukeville E
    |.....     |...... |--32-110 Tucson E
    |.....     |...... |--32-111 Tucson W
    etc.
    |.....     |--30x60
    |.....     |--State

where the 1x1 degree squares, containing 64 quads, is named by its SE corner lat-long and the name of the corresponding 1:250K topo, either its east or west half.

Naming the squares introduces the first problem. If you already have a significant collection of quads, my naming convention probably differs from yours. The issue which that introduces is that the path in the .map files must specify the exact directory names, if you want to do anything special with the organization of the .map files. An example of "special organization" is presented futher along on this page. If you don't, then you can just plop the map images and the .map files in the same directory, making the path in the .map file irrelevant.

Two reasons for special organizations/collections are (1) making it easier to find a map in a specific area like a park, by reducing the number of files that appear in the directory list and (2) taking advantage of Ozi's moving map "search for more detailed map" function to confine it to specific scale maps or other desired search outcomes.
Let's say that hunting through a directory of tens or hundreds of maps is not your thing, particularly if you are concentrating on a small area, say a park or within a few miles of the coast or perhaps following a trail like the Pacific Crest. It would make it simple if only the maps of interest were in the directory. There are two ways to do this. You could copy all the maps (the images and their associated .map file), and put them in a new directory. This may increase your storage requirement by a few hundred megabytes. On the other hand, you could copy only the .map files into the new directory. The path in the third line of the file would still point at the proper directory of the image, so Ozi would work fine.

So why wouldn't you always use the second option? Because it makes the job of making unique CDs harder--in most cases I've found that you'd have to cull all the extraneous files from the directories in order to make the total size fit.

For example, the "Organ Pipe" directory in the screen shot is a special collection, but that directory could have the image files in it, in which case the .map files would point to itself. If the image files were

stored in their 'home' square, then the .map files would point to those directories, the Lukeville East and Ajo East squares.
Now comes the decision. The graphic below shows 9 special collections of California Quads, five along the coast, 3 parks, and the wine country. Note that the wine country significantly overlaps the north central coastal collection. These collections have both the .map files and the map images, where the .map files point to the unique directory, eg, [/Maps/California/24K/Joshua Tree/map name]. Eventually, if you also download the maps in each 1x1 square (see second graphic below), you will duplicate downloading hundreds of mb of image files.

If you like the collections, but intend to download the full squares, then you only want to download the collection of .map files that describe the unique area. You would then put only the .map files into a unique directory. These significantly smaller archives are designated as "Separated Cal Files Only" in the download table (on the next page).
Nine unique collections shown above.
CA quad availability shown above.
Future special collections for California will include Yosemite, Kings Canyon, Death Valley, and the Pacific Coast Trail.
Go To the Files List