Upgrade Garmin Map without Deleting Old Files

2011-07-08


If you want to upgrade Garmin map from official site, just go to their site and follow their guide to do. You know you need to pay for the upgrade.

There are some resources of unlocked new Garmin map in the internet. If you like just search out them. Most of map files should work. However, we still strong recommend you buy official upgrade map files.

Here we just introduce how you can keep the original map files in your Garmin GPS and upgrade your map.

You need an extra SD card, and your Garmin should have a SD card slot:

upgradeGramin00 After you confirm your Garmin has a SD card slot, then you can start the following steps, otherwise, you have to find other ways from somewhere; 1. Download unlocked new Garmin map files; (We do not introduce this information here since it is not hard to find a unlocked map file through internet); 2: Check the downloaded file size, normally, the map file size is less than 2GB, so your SD card should has at least 2GB available space; 3: Plugin you SD card to computer and create a folder named “garmin” on it (Please confirm if your Garmin need a upper case ‘G’armin or lower case ‘g’armin for some cases); 4: Copy downloaded img file into the “garmin” folder, if the downloaded file’s name is not “gmapsupp.img”, change the name to “gmapsupp.img”, for example, 2012 map might named “gmapprom.img”, you should change its name; 5. Plugin the SD card into your Garmin GPS; 6: Turn on your Garmin GPS, select Tools>Settings>Map>Map Info, Only check on the newest map file; 7: You’d better restart the GPS to make sure it is using the newest map file; (you might not need to do restart, but for our case, we used Garmin 265w, we found we had to restart to load the newest map file, do not know how about other Garmin GPS) (Note: When you use GPS, please DO NOT plug out the SD card unless you do not need the upgraded map)