GE Plugin

Google Earth API /plugin finally coming to an end

December 13, 2016

Google has announced that they are finally shutting down the Google Earth API /plugin on Wednesday, January 11, 2017. They first announced its deprecation in December 2014, giving it a year. In December 2015, they gave it a temporary reprieve, which is finally running out.

The Google Earth API is based on an old technology called the NPAPI plugin framework and is primarily intended to allow Google Earth to be run in a browser and controlled with JavaScript. However, it has been used in some desktop apps as well. The NPAPI plugin framework is considered outdated and insecure by most browser vendors, and some, including Google Chrome, have dropped it altogether. Others, such as Firefox (32-bit), allow you to use it but only after specifically allowing the plugin to run.

We will miss it, as it was a good way to access information about historical imagery and we used to create imagery update maps using it. However, since June, Google has not updated the ‘historical imagery’ layer (other than the recent addition of the global Landsat/Sentinel mosaics)

Google Earth 4
At the same time, Google is ending support for Google Earth 4. Anyone running Google Earth 4 will no longer be able to access imagery from January 11, 2017. The current latest version is 7.1.7.2606

If you absolutely need an older version, you can download older versions going back to Google Earth 5.0 here.

Here’s hoping Google can come up with a new Google Earth API that allows us to control Google Earth and query its data.

One of the uses we had for the Google Earth API was studying [historical imagery density](One of https://www.gearthblog.com/tag/historical-imagery-density).

Making use of the Google Earth API

July 5, 2016

Although the Google Earth API was officially deprecated back in December 2014, Google chose not to shut it down on schedule in December 2015 and have instead kept it running. Although you should not design websites around it as most browsers no-longer support the technology it is based on (NPAPI), it can still be a very useful tool for particular purposes.

Today we are sharing a tool based on the Google Earth API that we developed for our own purposes, but think others might find useful. If you have a collection of placemarks and want to know whether or not Google Earth has relevant imagery, rather than switching to ‘historical imagery’ then checking them one by one in Google Earth, this tool can do much of the work for you.

As an example of what it might be useful for, we took this page on Wikipedia that lists the locations of all the tornados in the United States from January to March 2016. We used the provided coordinates to create placemarks in Google Earth. We then used the tool to generate a new KML which shows which placemarks have imagery from 2016.

Placemarks with imagery from 2016 are highlighted in green.

It is not perfect in this particular situation as it does not tell us whether the imagery in question was captured before or after the particular tornado. To achieve that, we would have to find a way to include the tornado date in the original KML file. But it does considerably cut down on the number of placemarks we should check if we want to find signs of tornado damage. You can get the above KML file here. Keep in mind that many of the tornados were very week and did almost no damage.

In order to use this tool, you need to open this page in Firefox which, as of this writing, still supports the Google Earth API. The first time you open the page, you must click the link that says ‘Activate Google Earth’, then choose ‘Allow and Remember’ in the popup. Then refresh the page.

Next, select the KML file containing the placemarks you want to use, and enter a date in the space provided and click “Get Dates”. The tool will check the latest imagery date for each location and when complete will download a KML file which you can view in Google Earth. Note that each placemark takes two seconds because we find that the Google Earth API is a bit unreliable if rushed. The resulting KML file includes all placemarks from the original file and puts the date of the most recent imagery in the placemark description. In addition, it colour-codes the placemarks yellow and green depending on whether or not the latest imagery is before or after the date provided below.

Status:
KML file:

Date: (yyyy/mm/dd)

Tips for creating historical imagery animations

June 9, 2016

This post is some tips for creating historical imagery animations using the ‘Historical Imagery Tour Maker’ we released in yesterday’s post.

Tilt

The Google Earth plugin, like the default setting in Google Earth, tilts the view towards the horizontal as you zoom in close to the ground. In Google Earth you can stop that behaviour in “Tools -> Options -> Navigation -> Navigation”. For the plugin, there is no access to the settings, so, if you want your animation to be from directly overhead, be sure to press ‘u’ on your keyboard to reset the tilt after you have zoomed in to your area of interest. For a list of other Google Earth keyboard shortcuts see this website

Cache the imagery

If you do not have very fast internet, set the ‘step’ to several seconds and click ‘play’ and allow it to cycle through all the imagery in order to cache the imagery before you begin. In addition, when creating your final tour, you can create two versions, one with a long ‘step’ to be run first to pre-cache the imagery, then another to play it at the desired speed.

Maximum speed

If you use a step less than about 750 milliseconds, then Google Earth cannot keep up and will not show all the historical imagery when playing the tour. We are not sure whether this varies depending on your computer’s speed.

Recording Video

We have found that the built-in recording functionality (Tools->Movie Maker) of Google Earth Pro works rather well. However, it removes the historical imagery time bar and the status bar, so you cannot see the dates in the resulting footage. We used the highest quality settings and 10 frames per second. One nice feature of the Movie Maker is that it waits for imagery to load.

Before you start recording, make sure the tour is not set to auto repeat or the recording never stops.

Screen recording software can also be used. Use F11 to go full screen then hide the side bar and tool bar. We don’t know of a way to hide the menu.

Here are a couple of tours we have created:

Get the Google Earth tour here

Advanced Historical Imagery Tour Maker with the Google Earth API

June 8, 2016

There are several different ways to automate animated historical imagery that we have explored in the past.

The first, and easiest, is to use a Google Earth Tour that simply changes the date by a given increment at a set frequency. So you could, for example, change the date by one month every second. In this post we presented some JavaScript to help with creating such tours. The main disadvantage of this technique is that Google Earth’s historical imagery is not regular and so you end up with periods of no imagery changes, and some skipped images. The technique does have the advantage of accurately representing the passage of time.

The second technique is to obtain the list of imagery dates using the Google Earth API and then use a tour to change the date, showing each existing image at a given frequency. This results in an animation that shows all the images in a given time range. We presented a tool for doing this in this post.

An outstanding problem that occurs with both techniques, is that Google Earth imagery is often not the best quality so you get an animation that includes some images with excessive cloud cover or updates that only cover part of the area of interest and do not look good. In addition, if you are trying to show change over time, you may not want images that are too close together in time if no significant differences can be seen between them. When we manually create animations for the blog we choose each image to include.

Some time ago we created a tool for creating Google Earth Tours that include or exclude images of your choice. We created it at the time the Google Earth API was expected to be shut down, so we chose not to share it. However, Google has so far kindly kept the Google Earth API alive, so we think people may find it useful.

It requires a browser that supports the Google Earth API, which, as far as we know is only Firefox. So, you will need to open this post in Firefox, and click ‘Activate Google Earth’ and then ‘Allow and Remember’ in the popup.

Instructions

To begin, zoom in to the location where you want to create the animation. Then click ‘Get dates’. The tool will obtain the list of dates available for that location. Note that for locations with a large number of images, this may take a bit of time.

For most animations, you will want to start the animation at a specific point in time. Go to the date you wish to start at in the Google Earth plugin, then click ‘Set first date’. This will exclude all dates before this date.

Now go through each image deciding whether to include it in your animation or not. You can either select images with the plugin or use the ‘Next’ button to cycle through images. If you definitely want an image, click ‘Include date’, if you definitely do not want an image, click ‘Exclude date’. The tool has two modes. You can choose to select specific dates to include in your animation, or select specific dates to exclude. If you are only removing a few images, then the latter mode is easier.

Once you have gone through the imagery you can see how it will look by clicking the ‘Play’ button. If you are satisfied with the results, set speed of the animation by adjusting ‘Step’ which is the time between frames, then click ‘Download Tour’. You can now open the downloaded file in Google Earth and play the tour.

(warning! clears included and excluded lists)

loop. Step (milliseconds):

Use ‘includes’ only
Use ‘includes’ and ‘dates available’

Included dates	Dates available	Excluded dates

Where next after the Google Earth API?

December 2, 2015

With the end of the Google Earth API imminent we are having a look at what various sites that depend, or used to depend on the Google Earth API are doing about it. Earlier this year we did a showcase of sites that use the Google Earth API and we will have a look at a selection of those sites.

The first is Rally Navigator. It is a comprehensive online application for creating rally road books, which are a set of instructions used by rally drivers and their co-pilots to map out a course and know what is coming next at each turn of the road. Knowing that the Google Earth API was coming to an end, the developers of Rally Navigator redesigned it to use Google Maps instead. Although it now lacks 3D effects we do not believe it has lost any essential features as a result of the conversion and has gained more features with time. So if you are a rally driver (or co-pilot) then you should definitely check it out. It has both free and paid for versions.

Next up is GETeach. This site was converted to use Google Maps even before we reviewed it earlier this year, but they left the Google Earth version online and it can still be found here. GETeach is designed to use as much screen space as possible for the maps, which leaves very little space for menus or other information telling you what it does. So the first thing you should do is view the help page to get an idea of its features and how to access them.

We do feel that the loss of the Google Earth API in this case does mean the loss of a lot of useful features that simply cannot be replaced by Google Maps, notably the loss of historical imagery and 3D imagery. Although Google Maps does have 3D imagery, it is not accessible via the Google Maps API as is used for this site. Even with the loss of the Google Earth API, however, it is still a great site and would be very useful in the classroom, so be sure to check it out.

Next is Flightradar24, a flight tracking website that shows the live locations of flights around the globe. It used to have a 3D view, which used the Google Earth plugin to show a model of an aircraft in the correct location on its route. They currently have a message stating that due to the demise of the Google Earth plugin, they are currently working on a replacement 3D experience. We will have to wait till they are done to see how it compares to the old Google Earth API experience.

Last but not least is GEFS Online, a popular flight simulator based on the Google Earth API. As far as we can tell, no significant development work has been done on the site for quite some time, with the last blog entry being nearly two years old. We can only guess that there are no current plans to move to an alternative platform and that the site will die along with the Google Earth API.