Peak Finder

Use the peak finder button to show a display of nearby peaks and topography to match with your current surroundings. This is displayed on top of the image seen through your camera lens. As you move the camera the display will identify peak that are visible on the horizon.

The peak finder display has a number of controls. Use the close button to close the display. The elevated view control is used to alternate between ground level view (what you see through your camera) and a view from 2000m above ground level. The manual control is used to fix the position of the profile on the screen so that you can manually scroll the display to align with the camera image, or just to visualise the surrounding terrain without moving the camera (on phones without a magnetic compass sensor, manual mode is always engaged). The transparency slider is used to make the camera image more or less visible behind the peak finder display.

The peak finder works by calculating the direction your camera is facing from the compass and orientation sensors in your phone. The compass sensor in particular will have some degree of inaccuracy and it is likely that the peaks and topography displayed doesn’t exactly match the camera image. This is normal. It is also possible that the compass reading can be very inaccurate – it is important to understand how to calibrate and use your compass to get the best results. See the compass use guide in the help files on this site for further info. The manual alignment mode can also be used to more accurately align the camera view if you wish.

The peaks displayed are ones that are calculated to be visible from your current location based on the ground level topography. The peaks are selected from the list of placenames included in the NZTopo50 map and classified as ‘Hills’ by LINZ. This includes mountain peaks as well as smaller named hills. In some cases there may be a lot of peaks displayed in a small area, in which case only the labels for the closest peaks will be readable.

The topography profile that is drawn is calculated from the digital elevation model data in the app. It is a set of elevations on an 80m grid, so features smaller than this will not be reliably described.