Google Earth Blog

The amazing things about Google Earth


Frank Taylor

Geotagged Flickr photos on the fly…

[EDIT – 10-Jan-2006: this network link is currently not working. The author who supported it recently went to work for Flickr and is migrating it to new servers at Yahoo (who own Flickr).]
This is truly an amazing feature of Google Earth. It’s all about the network link – a feature Google Earth has to allow a place you are viewing to tap into applications or data running on someone elses server on the Internet.
Imagine being able to find the photos anyone has taken near the place you are looking at in Google Earth. Imagine little icons of the photos appear magically at the coordinates where the photos were taken from within Google Earth. Now, follow this link to watch it happen right now! (NOTE: Turn this Place link on, then place yourself at a place of interest and wait 30 seconds or so. Little photo icons should start appearing if there are photos at Flickr near those coordinates. If not, try moving to a more popular location or zooming out a bit.)

You can click on the little photo icons and a pop-up cloud appears with a link “View at Flickr” which will let you see the full-sized photo.
The Network Link is the most power feature within Google Earth. There are already lots of interesting features being implemented using the network link and I predict there will be even cooler features coming out soon.
I found the Flickr 50 network link through this post at the Google Earth Community.

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.

Sightseeing in Google Earth

All of us go and explore the Earth after installing Google Earth (GE). But, some of the most interesting things are hard to find. Thankfully, thousands of other people want to share their finds with you. The hard part is finding the best.
The first place to look is at the Google Earth Community (it’s at the Keyhole site, since Keyhole was the original version of the product before Google bought Keyhole). You can find all kinds of interesting places by reading these forums. But, the format is kind of hard to use to delve through all the information and find the real gems.
Another good site is www.gearthhacks.com. At the time of this writing they have over 2000 entries and a nice “photo” gallery approach to showing interesting Google Earth places. I will be including these and other locations in my reference section soon.

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.

Hurricane Tracking


(click for larger image)
During mid-July Hurricane Emily crossed the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. I was just learning about Google Earth’s KML file format, so I decided to create a hurricane track . Based on another post in the GE forums by someone called mcshea98, I created a track and updated a few times a day based on data from WeatherUnderground. The numbers along the track represent the hurricane category, and if you click on the numbers you will get data such as wind speed and pressure. I posted the KML file on the GE Forums here.
Both visual satellite and infared satellite photos are downloaded in real-time when you first open the GE file. Since the storm is long gone, what you will see now is the current weather conditions.
As you can see from the screen shot, the hurricane was located where my track was at the time of the screenshot. As your child gets older, the more technology-based their toys are going to get. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be just as educational as the toddler toys they had in preschool, though. There are a lot of choices out there when it comes robot toys for kids. Cooking at home is as popular as ever, especially with the introduction of all sorts of new technologies and tools that make your time in the kitchen better and more effective than ever. Portioning, preparing, or just making sure your meal is immaculately prepared on a day to day basis, now is possible with the best kitchen scales from https://scaleszen.com/best-digital-kitchen-scales/.
Click here to see the file itself from within GE.

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.