open cpn changing chart names

[johnmwalsh]

Hello everyone, hope you are well. i am using opencpn on a raspberry pi, i want to put my charts into groups but would like to rename them so i can pick which ones should go into that group. is there a way to do this? i am starting with the charts for the chesapeake bay and delaware bay. thank you!!! john

[stevead]

Possibly better asked on the OpenCPN forum, but I'll give it a go.

Assuming you are using the Chart Downloader to download charts from NOAA, you probably don't want to rename the chart folder names (Eg. US_WA, US2WC12M) or the chart names (Eg. US2WC12M.001) outside of OpenCPN as that will "break" the Chart Downloader catalog, most likely screw up future chart updates and possibly require OpenCPN to update it's internal ENC chart rendering cache.

Probably what you are trying to achieve requires you to do the following (in Open CPN):
1. Create Chart Folders to match your proposed Chart Groups.
2. Create Chart Groups and add Chart Folders to their respective Chart Groups
3. From the Chart Downloader, Add each catalog and select the Chart Folder to match the respective catalog.

I've attached some piccies to possibly help.

You may also want to refer to the OpenCPN Online Help

No biggie for those of you in the US to play around with Chart Folder, Chart Group names and catalogs ad-infinitum as the NOAA charts are free of charge to download.

[Kettlewell]

What's the point of doing this since you can store every NOAA chart available for the entire country in about 13GB, including both raster and vector charts. Just load all of them up!

[stevead]

The use of chart groups does not preclude downloading all of the charts from NOAA.

The benefit of chart groups is twofold:
1. It makes it easy for the user to swap the display of different types of charts for the area in which they are currently sailing (raster, vector, mbtiles etc.)
2. For resource constrained devices such as an Android tablet, a Raspberry Pi or the ancient laptop gathering dust, it allows OpenCPN to only load and cache the charts from the selected chart group, rather than all of the charts, which may have an observable performance benefit.

In the OP's example, why burden a CPU limited and RAM constrained Raspberry Pi running OpenCPN with loading and caching the charts for all of the US, when just sailing around Chesapeake Bay?

[johnmwalsh]

Thank you for all of your replies!