Last November I wrote about an excellent placemark collection which compared photographs from a famous French photographer to Google Earth’s satellite/aerial photos. At the time, Rednick (the guy who posted the collection), had only marked about 125 photos. Now the collection has grown to over 500 photos. The photos come from a book called “Earth From Above” by Arthus-Bertrand. The book contains excellent photos of beautiful or unusual locations all around the world as seen from, you guessed it, above. (Note: there’s at least one photo of a highly populated nude beach, you can probably guess where).
Once you download the collection of placemarks, open the folders in the Places pane called “Arthur Bertrand Tour” (CAUTION: do NOT turn on the contents of the entire folders as it will load all the images at once). It is best to turn on one placemark at a time and turn them off when you are done looking. Otherwise the images will take up considerable amounts of memory.
Sometimes Rednick has included the photos from the books as image overlays (make sure you double click on the placemark items to get the preset view). In other cases, he has a camera view where he has tried to accurately portray the same view as the photograph. In some of the placemarks, you can see the photo in the descriptions. The folder called “THE TOUR” contains most of the photos. He also has a folder called “CHALLENGES” which contains photos, but he leaves it to you to guess the location. This is one of the most popular collections of placemarks at the Google Earth Community, and you can see why. Great work Rednick!
About Frank Taylor
Frank Taylor started the Google Earth Blog in July, 2005 shortly after Google Earth was first released. He has worked with 3D computer graphics and VR for many years and was very impressed with this exciting product. Frank completed a 5.5 year circumnavigation of the earth by sailboat in June 2015 which you can read about at Tahina Expedition, and is a licensed pilot, backpacker, diver, and photographer.
When “flying” over the earth with GE, we can see our position changing (longitude and latitude),it would be cool to be able to display the speed… that way, it would be possible to simulate the real speed of a plane.