
Managing Maps: display, central data store and layers
TrailRunner loads background maps and places them into a central store. But if you manually add more maps, they are displayed on top of these.
To organize the maps you've added manually TrailRunner helps you with two features: the central data store and layers.
Central Data Store
You can move map tiles to the central data store. All documents referencing a geographic area will automatically display background maps from the central store. Using the central store will massively reduce the file size of your documents because the maps are not stored inside the document anymore. Use File > Consolidate > File selected Bitmap centrally / locally to move or remove a selected map tile to or from the store.
Note that map tiles in the central data store can not be moved or deleted until they have been removed from it. If you remove maps from the store, all documents referencing this area will miss the map too. Be aware of this when you move a document over to another Mac with a different central data store. To backup your store, please read the chapter Files and Backup of this book.
Layers
Under Document settings the section Map display shows a layer control. The first three layers contain maps stored in the central data store. The last layer named Document contains maps stored in the document itself.
When you load maps from the internet using the build in client, TrailRunner places the maps into layers by quality of the map source. The best quality is Hiking map. This is important because better quality maps will be displayed atop of other lower quality layers.
When you import or paste maps into a document the maps will be placed into the layer named Document. Maps stored in the document are not stored centrally.
To select map tiles in a layer you first need to unlock it. Press the lock symbol of the layer. Unlocked layers show an open lock symbol.
To move a selected map to a different layer, select the map tile and press the curved arrow on the left side of the target layer. You will notice that the number of elements in the original layer will decrease by one and the number in the target layer will increase by one.
To display or hide all maps in one layer, press the eye icon.
The layer opacity slider will make all maps stored in the given layer transparent to let underlying maps shine trough.
The selection opacity slider sets the opacity of the currently selected map tile to support the alignment of maps (see chapter Aligning map tiles of this book)
Consolidate map tiles
If you have many small and overlapping map tiles, you can consolidate them to greater tiles and additionally move them to the central data store.
Use File > Consolidate > Consolidate Image Bitmaps to apply this process to all map tiles in any unlocked layers.
Mastering the Central Data store
With all the above, please keep the following in mind:
As soon as you move maps to the central store they are fixed. You can't either move or rotate them afterwards.
This also means that if the position or size of the maps in the store is wrong, you can't change that unless you remove the maps from the store into the document, re-align them and put the maps back to the store.
What you should know next
Aligning map tiles
if you have scanned several map tiles, you can align and adjust the map tiles using the grid toolset and the brightness slider.
Files and Backup
TrailRunner not only stores information in your document but also in files located in your user directory. For optimal happiness, regularly backup these files.