Share photos with the world

Posted on 7 Dec 2007 at 11:24

One of the many joys of Google Earth is that it can be used as a virtual guidebook of your travels around the world. Digital pictures can be mapped to the place they were taken, providing you with a personal reminder of your holidays. They can also be easily shared with friends and family, or even all the other Google Earth users out there.

There are several ways to "geotag" photos with Google Earth, but one of the easiest is with Google's own photo album software, Picasa (www.picasa.com). This free download not only makes browsing through a large photo collection wonderfully smooth, but also allows you to geotag one or even an album full of photos within seconds. In Picasa, select the photos you wish to geotag by dragging them into the tray in the bottom left of the screen. Now click Tools | Geotag | Geotag with Google Earth.

The Google Earth software will open and you'll be presented with a mini-window containing your photos and a crosshair target. Navigate to the place where your photos were taken - either by manually zooming to the location or entering the town name into the search box - and when you're happy that you have the crosshairs centred on the exact spot, click the Geotag button. If all of your selected photos were taken in the same spot, you can select Geotag All; if not, adjust the crosshairs for each and geotag them individually.

Once you've tagged all your photos, you'll find the album is stored in Google Earth's Temporary Places folder and given a rudimentary name such as My Picasa Photos. You can change the name of the album by right-clicking on its title and selecting Properties. You can also rename each of the individual photos in the folder in the same manner, and add a caption to the photo by entering the text above the HTML code in the Description box. Take care not to overtype any of the HTML. Once you've named all the photos in the album, right-click on the album title and select Save to My Places as any albums left in the Temporary Places folder will be deleted when you close Google Earth.

Now you have the photos geotagged and stored in your version of Google Earth, how do you share them with others? You can email an album of snaps or an individual photo by right-clicking on its name and selecting the Email option. This wraps your photos and the geodata into a KMZ file - a KML location file with the image file included - which is attached to an email that's ready to send from either Outlook or Gmail. When the recipients open the attachment, it will automatically display your photos in their version of Google Earth.

As with the maps, you can also host the KMZ file on your own website or server, and allow people to download the photos from there. To do this, right-click on the album in Google Earth and save it as a KMZ file, then upload it to your server. You could, for example, host your round-the-world trip photos as a KMZ file on your blog and allow friends and family to retrace your steps.
You can geotag one or several photos simultaneously with Picasa 2 and Google Earth.
If you've ever switched on the Geographic Web layer, you'll have noticed the little blue dots that appear on the map. Click on one of these dots and you'll discover photos of the area you're looking at, taken by other Google Earth users. These photos are provided by Panoramio (www.panoramio.com) - another Google-owned site that allows people to upload their landscape photos for inclusion into Google Earth.