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Thursday, May 19, 2011

Installing maps onto Samsung WB650(HZ35W) Camera

Samsung WB650 or HZ35W is one of the best compact zoom cameras. You can find the review of the camera Samsung WB650 or Samsung HZ35w(thats how its named in the US) here. The stand out feature for this camera is the ability to geo-tag photos with GPS. It also has a dedicated mode where you can view the photos taken with GPS in a map. But Samsung however did not provide a clear procedure on how to install the maps.




So here I intend to give the step by step procedure on how to install the maps onto Samsung WB650(HZ35W).Remember these steps are absolutely not required to take photo with GPS enabled. Its required only if you intend to use the map view mode to see the photos in maps in your camera.



Samsung has restricted the download of the maps to only 3 times. If your download exceeds thrice then you may not be able to download the maps any further. So here we go:

Step One: Go to www.samsungimaging.com and register your product(top right corner). Then from the home page select maps download at the bottom right corner of the home page. Clicking it should prompt you to provide your name, country and the serial number of your camera found near the battery department.

Step Two: Click submit and then read the license agreement. Click agree to proceed. That should take you to the download page.

Step Three: Download the three zip files that are required. They are
a)City Name(zip file).(Common for all countries)
b)Base map(zip file).(Common for all countries)
c)Your country map for example IND_08Q3.zip in my case India that is.
Remember these files are huge files so make sure you are on a good Internet connection.

Step Four: Create two folders namely city and mapview(upper/lower case doesn’t matter) in the SD Card.

Step Five: Unzip the city.zip file that you downloaded, that should give a file called world.adm. Copy that file into the folder named city.

Step Six: Unzip the mapview.zip file and that should show you two folders and a file namely Map,res and a file called system.ini. Copy these two folders Map,res and the file system.ini into the folder mapview.

Step Seven: Now we have unzipped two files that are downloaded. Unzip the last file with your country specific name and in my case it is IND_08Q3.zip that corresponds to India. That should give you two files with extensions .cfg and .bgf. Copy these files into the Mapview/map folder (in the map folder available within the Mapview folder).

Step Eight: Now all done, this is the final and optional step.The .cfg file basically is a configuration file that stores a default location. It is this default location that is used when the GPS lock is unavailable. All you have to do is write down the GPS co-ordinates of your default location to this file. To know your locations GPS co-ordinates go here and type your location. That should give you two co-ordinates namely Latitude and Longitude. Now open the .cfg file, go to the column named “CEN_LON=” and append it with the Longitude value. Go to the column named “CEN_LAT=” and append it with the Latitude value. Thats it. The picture below should give you a fair idea.



You can copy maps files of any country. All you have to do is just put in that country's respective .cfg and .bgf files in the Mapview/map folder (in the map folder available within the Mapview folder).

If you would like to have a look at some awesome photos from this camera check it out here. One of the photo also won the Streets Scenery challenge 2011 in www.samsungimaging.com which can be seen here. And one photo awarded as the best photo is available in the Must watch gallery of the site
www.samsungimaging.com that can be seen here. You are free to use the photos anyway but link back to this blog. And of course you cannot commercialize those photos :). More details on the free usage can be seen here.

The comments section is open for discussions :).

13 comments:

Dave J said...

Many thanks for this information. I have been to the Samsung site and tried to understand their instructions without any luck. After following your instructions, I now have everything working perfectly.
Thank you for taking the time to do this.
I also agree that this is a fantastic camera.

remolon said...

Thank you Dave. I am happy it helped you :). If you liked my work spread the word:) You can also check some of my photos that i had published with Attribution,Non-commercial,Share alike Creative Commons License :)

Anonymous said...

That was a good post! It was very helpful :)

I found this site where you can download the samsung wb650/HZ35W maps for all the countries.

http://www.h33t.com/details.php?id=33b88fa83ba8675cca269be6505a07989530376e

Thanks!

Tommunbeig said...

Many thanks for this information. This is the second time I have had to do this horrible task. The Samsung web pages have all the information. It is just that they also contain all the "textbook" causes for maximum confusion. Do you have any knowledge of what the other folders are for?
Again thanks.
Ken.

Lud van der Garde said...

Thanks for your helpful info. Especially the positioning of the different files in the folders helped in getting a good mapview on the camera. Just one small addition: All coutry files contain the file bgmap.cfg If you copy other country files into the mapview/map file , the different country files will overwrite the bgmap.cfg file, resulting in the fact that the last copied country file will have it's .cfg file as default. I first copied the Netherlands file as this is my home country and later I copied the South Africa file as I will be going there next week. As I changed the cen.lat and cen.long to my home data, I'm assuming this is not a problem.

catt said...

Could you please tell me how to open the .cfg file so I can change my coördinates.
Windows suggests to find a program on the i-net but seems unable to find one ;

mactoshb said...

catt asked how to open and modify the .cfg file, I spent ages trying to find a program to edit it, plenty opened but would not edit
I then discovered that if you have the card in your computer and direct Wordpad to it and open it opens and allows you to modify the coordinates and save it to the card.

remolon said...

@Tommunbeig: Other than these folders you will find two more folders namely
DCIM:Here is where all your pictures taken using the camera is stored.
DataBase: This folder stores the files which has details regarding the faces that were recognised while you shot portrait images or pics with face recognition enabled. You may want to notice that the camera gives you option to give preference to a particular face so that the next time you take a snap that particular face gets the focus!

I hope it helped you and am extremely sorry for taking such a long time. I was held up with some work.

remolon said...

@Lud van der Garde:
Thanks for pointing out :)
@catt:
Am extremely sorry for such a late response. Its just an ordinary text file. So if you are on a MAC use the default textedit or if you are on windows you can use the notepad.
@mactoshb:
Once again extremely sorry for the reply! Its good that you figured it out! and yes wordpad can also be used!

Thank you for visiting my blog! Come back for more! Comments section is always open for discussions though the reply may be late am always having an eye on the blog. I'l try to join the discussions ASAP!

farooq said...

Thanks a lot for helping me out :)
i tried to do a lot of trouble shooting before i came across your post and now my problem is solved...
i just want to ask that suppose i Belong to Lahore, Pakistan and I often travel in different countries and cities so how to install different maps at the same time so to avoid the effort of installing different maps different times...
Hope you got the question?

Azmat fArooq said...

Thanks for this wonderful step by step information...
it solved my problem.

My question is that suppose if i live in one city and i go to other countries frequently so how to install all the maps once and for all so that camera can itself utilize the data and spare me the effort of going through the entire procedure again and again???

Ruislip_Rob said...

Hello, brilliant article, thanks you!! Just one question about the cfg files that 1 other user touched on.

I successfully copied across the UK map files but today need to copy USA map data as I am going on holiday there.

The USA cfg file overwrites the UK cfg file in the mapview folder. Does this matter??!

Thanks again.

The Tech Enrepot said...

@Azmat Farooq and @Ruislip_Rob:

All you have to do is have a backup cfg file renamed to some name. When you go to a particular country rename the existing cfg to bakcup and the backup to cfg! :)