Disclaimer: I have purchased all my Michelin touring maps. I do not condone illegally digitizing their map content, but I can’t lug their atlases on bike tours. If I had all the Michelin touring maps of Europe on my iPhone I would be #stoked. They are the most detailed road maps for Europe, but more importantly, they show you the “green roads” and you want to be riding Michelin’s green highlighted roads in Europe. You probably could carry one European country on your bike, but the weight of Michelin’s France atlas alone is too bulky. Here is what I do to get the Michelin maps on my iPhone.

I use my Canon Powershot (10MB pixel) to photograph all the atlas’ pages I am interested in viewing on my iPhone. I use the highest image resolution setting (3648 x 2736) available on my Powershot. You need the higher resolution images so the place-name text doesn’t get blurry when zooming-in on your maps. You probably would get better results if you scanned your map pages but I find photographing the pages a much faster digitizing solution.

The next step is to import your map page images into a photo editing program like Apple’s iPhoto. You can use iPhoto’s quick-and-dirty auto image enhance tool to quickly improve your images. Next create an iPhoto album to hold all your page images, in my case, I have an album called “Spain Maps” with all my Spain images. But this doesn’t work. When you sync your photos/album within iTunes to your iPhone, Apple exports those map images with inadequate map resolution and the export resolution is not adjustable from iTunes or iPhoto.

This is when you need to go the iPhone Apps Store and purchase a FTP app to transfer those map images to your iPhone and not use iTunes to sync the map images to your iPhone. I purchased Air Sharing from the App Store for $4, it will allow you to transfer your map images to your iPhone without downsampling the image resolution during the transfer process. Air Sharing has a viewer that will allow you to open your jpeg map images. You can use all the standard iPhone finger gestures, to move around or zoom-in on your Michelin maps. I use reading glasses, so being able to control the zooming-in factor on the small map details is very nice.

You might be wondering why I don’t just use Google maps. There are two problems with Google maps. The first issue is that I may not have a data plan or cell coverage in the country I am visiting and can’t download the necessary maps. Maps are bitmap content, so they are bandwidth heavy too. The second problem with Google maps is that Google doesn’t know were the scenic routes are, the ones; highlighted in green. Michelin pays people to drive Ferraris all over Europe to find the coolest routes (no driving positions available currently). Honestly, Google map detail is weak outside of urban areas.

The day after I wrote this post, Google announced that they were adding bicycling directions to Google maps. In the screenshot below, Google maps does a pretty good job of finding the correct bike route from Fairview High to Boulder High. Google map directions for bikes only works for US locations currently and the feature doesn’t work for European locations or with the Google map iPhone app. Plus, you still cannot get the scenic route information that only Michelin maps provides.

Now I have my bike tour maps digitized on my iPhone, with no additional weight or storage space necessary.