Fixing my Garmin Nuvi 265wt

I couldn’t delete favorites or add waypoints from Google Maps

This is just a little article that might get picked up by the search engines to help others like myself who are frustrated with a little trick that Garmin Nuvi GPS units can play.

The history of my Garmin Nuvi frustration

I discovered that after some updates to maps and firmware, my Garmin Nuvi 265WT would no longer let me send waypoints from Google Maps to it. It looked like it was working – the status screen would happily proclaim that “Your locations have been sent.“  However, once I removed it from the USB cable and looked for it in my favorites, it was nowhere to be found.  Another feature to this problem was that I couldn’t remove any of my favorites from the Garmin.

  • I tried to hard reset it and erase all the user data – but those favorites kept coming back!
  • I deleted all the GPX files, but they still came back…

The Solution

After some interesting back-and-forth with Garmin support, research on Google and just plain old playing around, I discovered that the trick to fixing this (in my case) was in using Garmin BaseCamp.

With this app, I sent all the waypoints/favorites from my Garmin unit to the BaseCamp app.  Then I changed all the icons from the “dot” to a flag. Once that was done, I sent everything back to the Garmin. Suddenly I am able to update the Garmin with new locations from Google maps (I love this feature…) and delete favorites I no longer want to keep.

A happy ending…. Hope that helps someone!

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