Two of my favourite things: free and open software that people work on and share with us all and the map that everyone can contribute to have been bought together by Thomas Fischer.
He has written and published a Perl script called gpx2png which grabs your GPX file, downloads the tiles from OpenStreetMap that it needs and produces a very nice png image of the track over the OpenStreetMap tiles.
Thomas being an exemplary coder and Perl being extremely readable (like Python), it was very easy to change the track colours, background colours, etc. until I was happy with the outcome.
It’s already come in handy for visualizing the GPS tracks that the students in Leipzig are re-creating of people’s journeys to the Monday Demonstrations in 1989, for our project there.
Below is my first trial, using the GPX track made when on the ‘Going Solo’ residency, of a walk from Hathersage to Bamford.
Thanks, Thomas