Snip and Clip

Pretty much any device with a GPS receiver can save GPS data as GPX files. But what are these files good for? Quite a lot, provided you have a nifty tool like Prune [1]. This application looks deceptively simple, but it packs some rather useful features that can help you get the most out of your GPX files.

Configuring Prune

Prune itself doesn't require any installation. Because the application is written in Java, the only mandatory requirement is the Sun Java Runtime Environment. Prune is distributed as a ready-to-use .jar archive, and you can run it by either double-clicking it or using the java -jar prune.jar command in the terminal. Before you do that, though, you might want to install a few additional packages to extend Prune's default functionality. For example, to enable real-time 3D display of GPS data, you should install the Java 3D libraries [2]. To install the libraries, download the .bin installer and follow the instructions in the README.TXT file.

Another useful addition is the ExifTool utility for handling Exif data in JPEG image files. Prune uses this tool to write geotags to the correlated photos. The ExifTool utility is available in the repositories of many popular Linux distributions, so you can install it with the use of your distro's package manager.

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