Google Earth Tips

A common problem with Google Earth is long loading times due to having a lot of stuff in your ‘My Places’. Google Earth stores your ‘My Places’ in a KML file appropriately called myplaces.kml. Exactly where that file is stored depends on your operating system. See this page if you need to know where to find it. The myplaces.kml file is loaded when you open Google Earth and only saved when you exit, or if you explicitly save it during the session.

If you notice Google Earth is taking longer to load than it used to, then the most likely cause is a large myplaces.kml file. Before proceeding with the following tip, it is highly recommended that you backup your ‘My Places’. Simply right-click on the topmost folder and select ‘Save Place As’ then select where you want to back it up to.

The first step is to go through your saved places and remove anything you no-longer need. However, if you still have a number of items that you wish to keep and loading is still slow, then one trick is to move items out of your myplaces.kml file and into separate files that are referenced via a special feature called a network link. You probably don’t need to worry about placemarks that you have personally created as they typically take up very little space in KML. The real culprits are KML files you have imported from elsewhere that have a large number of items. For example, we found that just one item, a map of world borders constituted nearly a quarter of our myplaces.kml files size. The downside of moving items to network linked files is that you can no-longer edit them directly, so look for items that you don’t intend to edit in future.

Once you have identified an item you wish to extract, right-click on it and select ‘Save Place As’. Select a place to save it to on your computer that will remain accessible and that you won’t delete by mistake. Now right-click on ‘My Places’ and select Add->Network Link. Give your network link a useful name and click ‘browse’ and select the file you saved earlier. You should now see the items you saved in the new network link folder and you can safely delete the old version of it from My Places. Repeat this for other items, or alternatively put all the items you wish to extract into a single folder and do the above procedure only once.

Using the above tactic we were able to bring our ‘myplaces.kml’ file down from 40Mb to just 5Mb and Google Earth is loading a lot faster.

Keep the network links deselected and Google Earth will not bother reading when loading.

Today’s post is a tip for people that have both Google Earth and Google Earth Pro installed on Windows.

Today, our Google Earth installation updated automatically to the latest version. The problem is that we have both Google Earth and Google Earth Pro installed. We had previously manually updated Google Earth Pro when the latest version was released a couple of weeks ago. The result is that this latest update has reset all the file associations back to Google Earth even though we prefer to use Google Earth Pro. This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if you could just use the standard Windows method for changing file associations via the ‘Open With’ dialog box. However, due to a quirk in the way Google has set up the file associations in the Windows Registry, this method doesn’t work for Google Earth.

One solution we have used in the past is actually quite simple, but easily overlooked. The file associations are tied to whichever application was installed last. So if you want you KML and KMZ files to open in Google Earth Pro by default, you could simply reinstall it, and it would capture the file associations. However, when we tried this technique by installing using Google’s online installer it did not work. The file associations remained tied to Google Earth. So, we installed it using the offline installer found here. That did the trick, but apparently when you use the offline installer, the automatic updates are turned off. We then tried using the online installer for Google Earth Pro and it reset the associations back to Google Earth! Google must have got something wrong with the latest online installer.

If you are adventurous and wish to change the associations via the Windows Registry, find the following two keys:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\GoogleEarth.kmlfile\shell\open\command
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\GoogleEarth.kmzfile\shell\open\command

And change thier values to the following to associate files with Google Earth Pro
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Google Earth Pro\client\googleearth.exe" "%1"

Warning: Incorrectly modifying the Windows registry can have disastrous consequences. Please only try it if you are comfortable with making registry changes.

For the majority of people, however, once you have Google Earth Pro, you no-longer need Google Earth so you can simply uninstall it.

This post is a tip for people who work with KML a lot and generate KML from sources other than Google Earth. This could be programmers generating KML through code, people manually creating KML files by hand (a tedious job, but doable), or people getting KML from third party applications.

Google Earth has a setting called ‘KML Error Handling’ which decides what to do when opening a KML file with errors or features that Google Earth does not recognise. It is well worth keeping this set to ‘show prompts for all errors’ to double-check that you are producing good KML. It won’t catch all problems, but it can catch issues that you might otherwise overlook.

If you don’t care about KML errors then it is best to keep the setting on ‘Silently accept all unrecognised data’ as having Google Earth notify you of every error can be annoying, especially if you have an error in something in your ‘Places’, as Google Earth will warn you every time you open Google Earth. In addition, one of the built-in layers in Google Mars contains some KML errors and will pop up a message every time you switch to Google Mars.