Google Earth: Significant Places in Your Life Got Maps? Workshop June 17, 2013

1. Open Google Earth. 2. Familiarize yourself with Google Earth’s navigational features by zooming into Furman’s campus, your home, whereever. There are several ways to do this. Explore! 3. Create a folder to hold your tour - Right click on the ‘My Places’ icon in the left navigation area and select Add -> Folder.

4. The name of the folder should be firstname_lastname (e.g. Fred_Flinstone). Make sure there are no spaces. You can add a description as well.

5. The resulting folder should be checked and will hold the placemarks you add in subsequent steps. Please make sure this is the only active layer in ‘My Places’ (indicated with a check mark).

6. In Google Earth navigate to the spot of the first location in your tour. 7. Now it’s time to pin a placemark to that location in Google Earth. Single-click on the pushpin icon on the top menu of Google Earth.

8. Drag the pushpin to the appropriate location, enter a name for the placemark (e.g. ‘Furman Library’), and select ‘OK’.

9. Once the placemark is set, you can change the name and icon that represents your placemark – Right-click on the placemark and select ‘Get Info’ (‘Properties’ on the PC). 10. Select the icon next to the name to change the placemark image, select a new image, and click ‘OK’.

11. Enter a description in the placemark information window. I’ll use the Furman library as an example.

12. In order to add images to placemarks, they need to be online already (Facebook, etc.). We’ll assume you have some images online, or you can find online images to use for this exercise. The appendix describes a few options for storing photos online. Once you find an image online, right-

click on the image, and select ‘Copy Image Location’. This will copy the image URL to the computer clipboard.

13. Now it’s time to add the image to the placemark description. There are a couple of ways to do this. The first involves a little HTML coding; the second uses a shortcut. 14. If you want to try some coding, do this step. If not, skip to the next step (15). Enter the following, and provide the URL of your image between the quotes. (There is a space after ‘img’ below). <img  src=’http://theurlyoucopied/photo.jpg’>  

Your image may have a different extension, like .gif, .png, etc. Use the appropriate extension. Jpg is just an example above. You may have to retype the quote in the tag above, once you are in Google Earth, if you copied and pasted.

15. Google Earth has added new functionality. It will write this code for you if you use the ‘Add Image’ button and add the URL to your image.

16. Select ‘OK’ to close the info window, and click on your placemark. You should see something similar to the following. If not, let Mike or Diane know.

17. If the image is too big, let’s resize it. It would be best to edit the image in an image editor, like PhotoShop, and then upload it back to the web. Let’s take a shortcut instead. Add a width attribute to your image tag; the height should adjust proportionally. If no units are specified, the browser interprets it as the number of pixels. Right-click and select ‘Get Info / Properities’ to edit the placemark. <img  src=’http://gis.furman.edu/~yourfoldername/images/picname.jpg’  width=”350”>  

18. Let’s also make some of the text in the description stand out more. Make some of the description text bold and/or italics. Since you don’t have a WYSIWYG editor, you have to use HTML tags. Surround text with the following tags to change the emphasis. <i>Text I want italicized here </i> normal text here and <b> bold text here </b>

19. You’ll want to make sure that the placemark you added is within the Google Earth ‘My Places’ folder bearing your name. If not, let us know, or simply drag the placemark icon in the left menu into your folder. This is correct (placemark contained within the folder):

This is not:

20. Lather, rinse, and repeat for other placemarks until you have at least 5 placemarks (with at least two images total). Try adding a hyperlink to one of your placemarks. Link to a webpage of interest, like maybe the website of your current, favorite band. Here’s the syntax: I’ve been really enjoying reading <a href =”http://flowingdata.com/”>Flowing Data</a>, a website that shares interesting visualizations, including maps.

The <a> tag surrounds the text you want linked. Again, you may have to retype the quotes around the URL to get this to work. Google Earth has added a shortcut to this functionality as well. 21. You’ve probably noticed that carriage returns in your placemark don’t necessarily translate to line breaks in your placemark. The HTML equivalent is <br> or <br/>. The latter is best practice, but the former will work too. Add breaks in your placemarks to help with formatting.

22. To save the tour, right click on the Folder with your name in the left navigation area and select ‘Save As’. Google Earth gives you the choice of saving the file as a kmz or kml file. Kmz files are compressed, while kml files are an XML description of your tour and can easily be edited later. PLEASE SAVE YOUR FILE AS A KML FILE-NOT KMZ. If you’re using the CTL computers, be sure to create a folder on the Thawspace and save your work there. Otherwise, the file will be deleted when the computer reboots. If you’re using your computer, save the kml file in an appropriate location. Even if you don’t envision using placemarks in your class, kml or kmz is a common spatial data format, so creating a file and becoming more familiar with the format is very useful. In the next section, we’ll use the kml to make a web-based map. Other fun stuff:

• Try using the ruler tool in the top toolbar to determine the distance from where you are now to your car, your house, etc..

• Try the path and polygon drawing tools (also in the top toolbar)

Section 2: Creating a Google Map

1. In this exercise we will use the kml file we created in the previous step. You’ll need to create a Google account if you don’t have one already. 2. Once you have an account, go to http://maps.google.com. Log in if you haven’t already. 3. You may see a link to ‘Get advanced features with Maps Engine Lite’. Let’s ignore that for now. Google seems to be in a strange limbo phase right now. I think they are going to merge Google Maps and Google Maps Engine Lite soon. But for now, the latter is missing some of the functionality of the former, although it does have some cool features. 4. Click the ‘Create Map’ button in Google Maps. Give it a title (perhaps ‘Significant Places’), and choose the privacy settings. 5. Click the ‘Import’ link. Browse to the kml file you created earlier and upload it. 6. If all goes well, your placemarks from the previous step are now part of the Google Map. 7. Try and edit an existing placemark, and add new ones through the Google Maps interface. In the placemark pop-up, you can click the ‘Edit HTML’ link if you want to resize the image or format text as we did in the previous section; however, the rich text link allows you to do most of this without having to edit HTML. 8. See if you can invite another workshop participant to view or edit your map using their Google account. 9. Try toggling the base map over to Google Earth / Satellite view and then back to map view again.

10. Google Maps will save automatically, so just click ‘Done’ when you want to end your editing session. 11. You can share your map with others by clicking on the link icon below and sending them the URL. This will work even if your map is marked private.

Creating a Map in GeoCommons 1. GeoCommons is a powerful platform for making maps. We’ll do more with the online program this week, but let’s import the kml file to get an introduction. Create an online account at http://geocommons.com . 2. GeoCommons provides each user with a library, which is divided into 3 parts. A section for: 1) data; 2) maps made from that data; 3) saved analyses performed on the data, which we won’t do today. We’ll upload the data first—our kml file from part one. Go ahead and login to GeoCommons, and click on the ‘Upload Data’ button. 3. As you can see, GeoCommons supports many different file formats, including kml. Click on the ‘Upload Files’ link, and upload your kml file from earlier. After adding the file, click the ‘Next’ button. 4. The dataset is added with a ‘pending’ status. Click the ‘Next Step’ button. The kml contains geographic data embedded within it, so take the first option.

5. Click ‘Continue’. Then provide extra metadata about the dataset. This is especially important if you’re going to share your data with other GeoCommons users. For this dataset, you probably want to uncheck the following visibility options.

6. Click ‘Save’. Your dataset has been saved to the data section of your library and moves out of pending status. You can choose to make a map with the data. Click the ‘Map Data’ button. 7. You should see the data mapped from the Google Earth exercise. You can change the size, shape, icon, and color of the placemark. You can also change the style of the informational pop-up window, but you can’t change the information within it. Explore the options in the menu below. You can also change the basemap layer with the ‘Change’ button.

8. Click the ‘Save’ button and provide a name for your map. Also click on the permissions tab. Like data, maps default to public access, so you may want to uncheck the following:

9. Once you click save, your map is added to the map section of your data library. 10. Once you leave the edit session, you’ll see a ‘3D’ button, which when clicked, provides a Google Earth view of your map in the web browser. 11. To get to your library, click the arrow next to your user name in the header bar.

12. You can toggle between saved data, maps, and analyses using the tabs provided.

Appendix:

If you need to get images onto the web in the future, you can use Furman’s new cloud storage option, Box, or popular web photo solutions like Flickr and Picasa.      1. Furman ITS has provided detailed information about Box here: http://www2.furman.edu/sites/ITS/Services/Pages/box.aspx 2. Once an image has been uploaded to Box, you can get the URL for the image by right-clicking on the image in the Box web interface and selecting ‘Get Link to File’.

3. If the image is in a private folder, you’ll want to choose the following option so others can see it.

4. Then select the direct link option. This is the URL you can use in your Google Earth placemark.

 5. To reference images in a web photo album like Picasa, make sure the image is publicly available. Here’s an image of a spider that was hanging out in a tree by my car. While viewing the image in Picasa, right-click on the photo and select ‘Copy Image Location’.

6. You can reference these images in Google Earth as you did earlier, using the image location you just copied: <img  src=’http://lh3.google.com/mwiniski/Rzxl285vVyI/AAAAAAAAABk/Um_NLilmoOo/spider.jpg?imgmax=512’>   7. Google Earth will incorporate the image into the placemark description.

8. Check out publicly available photos at Flickr. The service makes it easy to find images that are available through Creative Commons licensing. Go to the Flickr advanced search page (http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/), and search for images with the following license.

9) Once you find an image, click on it, and click on the 'View all sizes' link.

10) Select an image size that suits your needs, right-click on the image and select 'Copy Image Location'.

11) You can use this URL to reference this image or download the image. Don’t forget to attribute your source by providing the URL to the image in your documentation, like so: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tiswango/37423818/