Thursday, April 05, 2007

KML Enhancements: My Maps

As reported on Google Earth Blog, Ogle Earth and elsewhere, Google today launched a new service for Google Maps whereby anyone can mark up, draw on and annotate a map directly within the Google Maps interface. It is very cool and super easy to use. You can read the user guide I wrote for this new service, which is called My Maps.

This relates to Google Earth because once you have created you map, you can export it to KML and thereby view it in Google Earth. After you create you map, click the KML link to download a KML file that contains the content you've created, then open the file in Google Earth.

4 comments:

Terrace said...

I'm very disappointed that My Maps only allows 50 markers shown at a time. What if you are trying to build a map with more than 50 locations?

If you've got a map with more than 50 markers... if you try to search for a town (to see if any markers are nearby), you're sunk, because unless the markers are among the first 50, they won't show up. This is a problem Google needs to fix.

Otherwise, if they don't... MapBuilder is still superior for maps with more than 50 markers. (They also let you choose smaller pinpoint markers, which Google does not.)

I haven't had a chance to try this on Google Earth... I assume the KML files let you display as many markers as you want at the same time... but then again, I dislike Google Earth because there's no way to show only road maps.

SIGH.

Terrace said...

Just wanted to add... I can understand the need to limit markers to 50 per screen; however, if I search for a town, the nearby markers ought to show up (especially if I zoom in on the town) without the user having to click through all the different pages of markers to see if they show up.

Anonymous said...

I have a Nikon D200 with a Garmin GPS attached to it, which puts lat/long, elevation, and GMT into the metadata of the photograph. Can I automatically link the photo with Google Earth?

John said...

Steve, thank you for your feedback. It is possible to view and publish KML in Google Maps. Read this posting (especially the last paragraph):

http://tinyurl.com/2opvr7