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RideEveryTile frequently asked questions

Here are some answers to questions about tiling and RideEveryTile. If the answer to your question isn't here, please email us and we will try to help you out.

Uploading rides

  • How do I start seeing what tiles I have been to?
    • Create an account
    • Login into the account
    • Go to your athlete page
    • At the bottom of the page, there is a 'Upload a ride' button. Click this and find the ride you want to upload as a file on your computer or phone
    • After the selection the ride will be uploaded and tiles at all zoom levels computed. The map will update and any changes in max square or max cluster will be displayed
    • The first upload may take a little while, but subsequent uploads should be very fast
  • What file types can I upload?
    You can upload .fit, .tcx or .gpx files. Any ride is generally in one of these formats. If you want to upload many rides at once, you can upload a .zip file that contains multiple of these files
  • How do I upload a ride that is on Garmin Connect?
    Login into Garmin Connect and in your feed go to the activity you want to upload. Click the small cogs at the top-right of the page (below your profile picture) and choose "Export Original". This downloads a file to your computer or phone. Now on your athlete page on this siteclick 'Upload a ride' and select the ride you downloaded.
  • Can I upload a ride that is on Strava (desktop computer)?
    Whilst logged into Strava, visit the activity page that you want to upload. Then click the three dots towards the bottom of the left-hand panel (below Segments). Click "Export Original". This downloads a file to your computer. Now on your athlete page on this site click 'Upload a ride' and select the ride you downloaded.
  • Can I upload a ride that is on Strava (iPhone)?

    If your ride is on Strava, then, yes, you can upload it to RideEveryTile from your iPhone. To download the file:

    • Go to strava.com in your Safari browser
    • Click the 'Aa' button to the left of the address bar and choose "Request Desktop Website"
    • You will see your usual main activity feed, with your rides and the people you follow
    • You can click the down arrow to the right of "Following" and choose "My Activities" to restrict to just your rides
    • Click on the ride of interest. You will get the normal desktop view of your ride.
    • Click the three dots on the left hand side (below 'Segments') and choose 'Export Original'
    • It will ask "Do you want to Download "{ride name}.fit". Just click download. The ride is now on your device
    A file will have been downloaded to the "Recents" area on your phone. Now on your athlete page on this site click 'Upload a ride' and select the ride you downloaded from the "Recents" area.

  • Is it possible to get a zip of all my rides and upload that?

    One way to get a zip of all your rides is from Strava. It will contain every ride you have uploaded. To do this:

    • - On Strava desktop whilst logged in, go to your account page
    • - Scroll down to 'Download or Delete Your Account' and click 'Get Started'
    • - On the next page click 'Request Your Archive'
    • - IMPORTANT Now just leave that Strava page. Definitely DON'T delete your Strava account

    Shortly Strava will send you an email with a link to download your archive of all your Strava data, including your rides. Download that archive. If you wish, you can directly upload that file. However it contains more data than this site needs (such as photos and potentially other personal information), so we strongly recommend you create a reduced zip file containing only the 'activities' subdirectory of the zip, for your own privacy. In any case, the zip file will be deleted when it has been processed. The maximum upload size is 500MB.

  • How do you use my data?

    Although you upload original files, these are not kept and are deleted after processing. Instead, a minimal set of data which just records which zoom 17 tiles you have visited is stored against your username on our server. All other data is derived from this data store. This policy minimizes personal data about you kept on our servers, and enables us to save on disc space.

    In the spirit of friendly competition, your tiling data is then available publicly on the website. Individual rides and visited locations with tiles are not shown. However, a website visitor may be able to guess roughly where you live, by assuming it is near the centre of your cluster or max square.

  • Why can't I link my RideEveryTile account to Strava and have my rides automatically processed?

    Unfortunately the rules that developers have to agree to in order to use the Strava API are very strict. You are told not to cache rider data for more than 7 days or to do anything that might compete with a Strava feature now or in the future. Although much of the API agreement appears to be ignored by both the Strava and developer sides currently, that may change in the future and it is not something I currently want to risk. Additionally, Strava are increasingly restricting the rates at which sites can make API requests, making it very hard to import rides promptly.

    This decision will be kept under reviewer. Hopefully you will find in practice the "download and upload" method is not too much more difficult than pressing the "Update" button from VeloViewer and waiting for processing.

  • Why is my tile count different on RideEveryTile to Squadrats/VeloViewer/StatsHunters?

    Generally there should be a close match between the tiles matched by RideEveryTile and other sites, but the match may not be exact. For example, at the time of writing 169,966 zoom 17 tiles on RideEveryTile but only 169,949 "squadratinhos" (i.e. zoom 17 tiles) on Squadrats, a difference of about 0.01%

    Reasons include

    • RideEveryTile processes original source files. If you are using a dedicated cycling computer (e.g. Garmin Edge, Wahoo ELEMNT) then the data can be a little more accurate than the Strava feeds used by Squadrats, Veloviewer and Statshunters, whose latitude and longitudes are rounded to 5 decimal places. This can matter if you enter a tile by less than a metre
    • Veloviewer uses 'summary' data by default from Strava, which is inaccurate. You need to click into the activity inside VeloViewer to process it.
    • The other sites have improved their processing accuracy over time, but some old rides may have been processed on an old algorithm
    • All sites know that you hate it if a tile is "missed", e.g. by "jumping a corner", and so usually do some kind of interpolation to try to figure out what tiles to give you. The fine details between interpolation schemes may differ. Again this should only matter for tiles that you were very very close to the edge of.
    If for any reason you think a tile is "missing" from RideEveryTile, please feel free to get in touch with us and we will try to help you out.

What happened to...

  • What happened to the 'global heatmap'?

    The 'heatmap' - the map of all tiles that 'anyone' has been to, has made a comeback! Unlike before, it features at every zoom level. You can view it at the heatmap page.

    Previously this heatmap used public data from VeloViewer. This is no longer possible, and so the number of visited tiles is a bit low at the moment. However we anticipate this will fill up as more people upload data to this site.

  • What happened to the max square and max cluster national leaderboards?

    As with the 'global heatmap', the national leaderboards used data from VeloViewer which is no longer available. If the data uploaded directly to RideEveryTile grows, we will re-introduce national leaderboards here too, at multiple zoom levels.

About tiles

  • How many big is a tile?
    The answer depends on your latitude, but zoom level 14 tiles about a mile square. Please see our tile size page for all the details.
  • How many tiles are there in total?
    The world is split into 2^14*2^14 = 2^28 = 268,435,456 zoom level 14 tiles. The size 14 tiles are the most common size. To find the number of tiles at other zooms, you can calculate 2^{2*zoom_level}

About tiling websites

  • Is Squadrats the same thing as a Veloviewer tile?
    Squadrats is a site that has copied the tiling concept from VeloViewer. It works in the same way - you link your Strava account to the website and it imports all your rides and figures out what tiles you have been to. The only major difference is that they use different words to describe concepts originally found in VeloViewer. Squadrats added the idea of zoom level 17 tiles. A full list of terms is shown below. RideEveryTile tracks tiles at all zooms.
    Squadrat termVeloViewer meaning
    SquadratA standard VeloViewer tile (or square)
    YardYour max cluster. Squadrats and Veloviewer use the same definition - a tile is part of a cluster if you have been to the four tiles around its sides (diagonals not needed). Your max cluster is your biggest cluster
    ÜbersquadratYour max square - i.e. the largest square consisting of visited tiles.
    SquadratinhoA much smaller tile. These are based on zoom level 17 of Open Street Map rather than the usual 14 and so each side has been split three more times. 2*2*2=8 and 8x8=64 so there are 64 "Squadratinhos" in each tile. They are approximately 0.1 miles wide.
    YardinhoYour largest cluster of squadratinhos. A cluster is defined in the same ways as tiles, but with the smaller tiles as the base building block.
    ÜbersquadratinhoYour "max square" of squadratinhos. This means getting into all the small tiles in an area and so private land becomes a major problem in rural areas. Perhaps one for cities?
  • Is StatsHunters the same thing as a Veloviewer?
    Statshunters is another site that has taken the tiling concept from VeloViewer. Again it works in the same - import your rides from Strava and it will figure out what (zoom level 14) tiles you have been to, and what your max cluster and max square are, amongst other statistics. The tiles on Statshunters are the same tiles as on VeloViewer - they are the zoom level 14 tiles from Google Maps/OpenStreetMap.