Last week we had a look at the new Voyager tours in the new Google Earth and suggested that Google create a tour maker or at least release instructions on how to create them. It turns out that, Josh of GE Teach, has managed to figure out how it is done and has released a simple tour maker for the new Google Earth. GE Teach is an excellent site we have covered a number of times in the past.
To use the tour maker simply go here and follow the instructions in the video below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MgTmCtEjfs
The tour maker is fairly rudimentary at present, allowing you to create placemarks with photos that open in the new side bar. But it is easy to use and produces great results and we expect he will add more features in the future. In addition, if you are looking to create more complex tours, the above tour maker is a good place to start to see how the new Google Earth’s tour system works.
One important thing to note is that although the tours are KML they do not run well in Google Earth Classic. Hopefully, Google will update the classic version to handle some of the new features.
Looking into the created KML files it seems Google has added some new custom tags to KML such as <gx:displayMode>
which can be set to ‘fullscreen’ or ‘panel’. We hope they update the KML documentation to include these extensions and how to use them.
Note that the GE Teach Tour Maker does not use the Tour features of KML, but instead creates a series of placemarks with links between them.