My Google Earth Experience

My experience with Google Earth was bitter sweet. After installing the software I absolutely loved navigating it. The way you can see places in such detail and speed is amazing. How could this be free? Well for this post I am going to describe my time spent learning to use the touring feature built into the software.
After gaining the rudimentary skills needed to navigate I began using search box provided on the left to locate my places of interest. In this case I wanted to find 5 college stadiums in the US so I can relate them to my Blue Devil Championship Podcast. The search tool was great and helped me quickly find each stadium by just its name. Now to make a tour with Google Earth it is necessary to create a number of place markers for the tour to visit at your command. I found creating a maker was as right clicking (windows) the desired search result and selecting copy, then pasting it into the “My Places” box under the search box on the left. For my purposes I created 7 place markers (2 were duplicates) and placed them into a sub folder under “My Places”. Now for my tour I wanted the program to visit each of my places, in order, and display a picture with my descriptions of each. As it was, each place had Google’s pictures, links and descriptions pre-set because I had copied them from the search box. Therefore I went into each and re-titled them and deleted all gibberish (HTML code) in the info box. Before saving each new place marker I found it convenient to relocate each in a place next to the stadium so when the info box pops up in the tour it doesn’t cover the stadium. Also if you right click the place marker after saving the properties and select “snapshot view” it saves the look or exact position of the globe. So later when I click the place marker it travels right to that snapshot view.

Ok now that my places were set I went back into each place markers properties and added a hyperlink and picture into each info section using; <img src="http://picture">
for the picture,
and
<a href="http://hyperlink">hyperlink name</a>
for the hyperlink.

With the place markers ready I started to record my tour by clicking the camera icon at the top of the programs window and then the red dot to begin recording. This is the point where my Google Earth experience became bitter. To spare you the hours of debugging and cursing I did I will cut to the chase. While recording the tour, it is not necessary to have the place markers checked to travel to each place. However, it is necessary to have each place marker checked if you intend to have the info pop up so you can see the descriptions of the places checked during the recording process. This minor detail was an easy fix that took wwwwwaaaayyyy to long to discover. Anyhoo the fix allowed me to continue my project and record. All I had to do was press record and double click each place marker to traverse the tour and click the place markers description when the motion stopped to pop up the info for that location. When the tour was over it saved into “my places” and tada; I had a cool tour.