Any way I can get a copy of the strava heatmap into my Garmin?

It would be nice to be able to follow the faint lines and find all the local trails I’ve not been on before. Struggling to figure out how to do it.

Anybody done similar?

I don’t have a Garmin that can do images but I’d imagine you probably need to save it as a jpg and then georeference it. The Garmin would just see it as another basemap.

Does Strava not allow you to save routes as a gpx file that could then be uploaded to the Garmin?

The only way I’ve managed is to plan in advance. Not sure you can do it on the go.

Which Garmin? There isn’t a ‘proper’ way to do it but you could probably do it with strava segments if you’ve got one of the models that does live segments (810,1000,520)if you really wanted.

Can it open a geotif? That’s how I do it on my phone. Its a bit fiddly but only takes a couple of minutes once you have the hang of it. Needs a free program called qgis. It might be possible to create other output formats.

To create heat map saved as jpg as geotif:

1. open QGIS
2. Menu – Web/openlayersplugin/opencyclemap (need to add plugin if not installed)
3. Zoom in to correct area
4. Menu – Raster/Georeferencer (need to add plugin if not installed)
5. Menu – File/open raster and open jpg
6. Edit/Add point or icon add point
7. Click a point on the map
8. Choose ‘from map canvas’
9. Find point on opencyclemap
10. repeat for 4-6 points
11. Menu Settings/transformation settings
Transformation type – Thin Plate Spline
Compression None
Outpur raster location/file.tif
Target SRS: make sure it matches map CRS eg EPSG:3857
Rest blank
12. Hit play icon
13. Map should open in main QGIS window and file will be created where specified in 11
14. Open file on phone in PDF maps

The simple and free but time-consuming way to do this (for my Etrex 30 at least) is:

Take a screen grab of the Strava heatmap you want;
Import the screen grab into Google Earth (maximum size is 1024×1024 I think);
Move and stretch the layer image you’ve created so it sits on top of the Google Earth map at the correct scale;
Export / save this layer as a .kmz file (this adds positional data to the image);
Put kmz file(s) into the same folder on your Garmin unit as your other maps are in;
Use ‘setup map’ menu on Garmin unit to enable ‘custom maps’.

I’ve used this a few times to get some local 1:25k OS maps on my Etrex 30. It’s frustratingly slow but worth it for small areas.

Thanks Dyffers, Etrex 20 here. It’s only a small area. I’ve been nightriding the local trails with others a lot but I can never find the best ones again and I’ve came across some really nicely sculpted routes that again I’ve never re-found. It’s all a little bit “local trails for local people”.

One way of finding the trails would be click on some segment leaderboardists’ profiles in the same area, download the gpx of their loops, and have them all showing on the screen. I can do that on my Oregon – not sure about the Etrex?

I’ve also got the heatmap on there:

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/local-trail-exploration-strava-heatmap

Just had another look at the heatmap. It’s been updated with 2015 data.

Bit more detail and a few more lines on there now. Need to have a bit of a think and a compare to see if I can be bothered to redo mine for the Garmin!

You can use the Strava heatmap for adding paths to OpenStreetMap.
Then you can get OpenStreetMap based maps and put them onto the Garmin.