For its GPS-enabled camera TZ-31, Panasonic offers to download additional geographic data from the accompanying DVD. Unfortunately, the software for copying the data to the SD card is for Windows only. When I examined the content of the DVD and the SD card after a transfer of European data, I recognized that there is nothing much to implement in order to have a similar platform independent tool.

Note: As pointed out in a comment, my script does not seem to be compatible with the new TZ40, because the directory layout for this camera seems to differ from the TZ31.

How to use it

I host the code of this mini-project on GitHub (download it here) All you need to do is

1. Download maptool.py and MapList.dat.
2. Open up a command-line and run the tool. For example:

   python mapdata.py --regions="6;7;8" --mapdata="/media/dvd/MAP_DATA" --sdcard="/media/sdcard"

3. Important: The tool will delete the subdirectory PRIVATE/MAP_DATA on the SD card, thereby removing any existing maps.

You get more information about the program options when you start the tool with option –help.

In order to adapt the above command for your setting, you should insert the DVD shipped with your TZ31 and plug in the SD card of your camera.

• –regions: each global region is assigned an integer between 1 and 10. If you install the official MapTool, then you can browse the regions from within the program or by opening the HTML files which are stored in the program files of the MapTool. As this tool here is meant to work independently from Windows, I extracted the region ids for you (see also –help):
  1 – Japan
  2 – South Asia, Southeast Asia
  3 – Oceania
  4 – North America, Central America
  5 – South America
  6 – Northern Europe
  7 – Eastern Europe
  8 – Western Europe
  9 – West Asia, Africa
  10 – Russia, North Asia
• –mapdata: the path to you map data which is normally stored in the subdirectory MAP_DATA of the DVD
• –sdcard: the path to the “root” of your SD card

Links

• [1] Downloadable code on GitHub