A few weeks ago I wrote about using Panoramio to publish and view images from around the world in Google Earth and Google Maps. At the time I posted just a single beach scene from Hamilton Island in Australia as a test image and noted that it takes a while for these images to appear to any user of Google Earth. At long last these have now appeared!

After I wrote the article I added a few more images I had lying around. After a few weeks, they started being flagged by the Panoramio reviewers as having been accepted by Google Earth.

However, when I looked at Google Earth I found that not all of the pictures were there. But a quick look at Google Maps showed that they were all present for anyone on the web to look at:

There appears to be a lag of around a couple of weeks between the image being flagged in Panoramio as being accepted and it appearing to other users of Google Earth despite it appearing in Google Maps much sooner. While I still really like Panoramio and will continue to add photos to it, I must admit to being frustrated by the long wait between submission and publishing of images. For my beach image it was a period of nearly two months, which I think will put a lot of people off.

Despite this there is a bit of a thrill in seeing your own photos in Google Earth. I’ve taken a screen shot to show the images as they appear from the Panoramio link. Since I can only see one side of the globe only a few images are visible – I’ve ringed them in red. Although looking at the image again, perhaps I should have drawn a nose somewhere mid-Atlantic and a smile somewhere near Ascension Island!

One improvement I would like to see is an optional email notification when an image has been accepted, and again when it is available in the various online applications.

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Something I came across recently was the ability to share your own photos of places around the globe using Google Earth. A Spanish company called Panoramio have created a very easy way of selecting locations on the globe and adding your own pictures. Other users of Google Earth can then see these photos by clicking on the camera symbols that get overlaid onto the map.

At first sight Panoramio looks just like yet another website that hosts online galleries. You can store upto 2Gb of pictures for free. Other users of the site can browse your pictures. But the big difference here is that you can do this by clicking on a Google Map window, and have the images appear to other people via Google Earth. A two way link between an image browser list and the map window means selecting an image in either window will select it in the other so you can see in a very dynamic way where pictures were taken. It is much easier to try than describe – go to the Panoramio Map and have a play.

And then the really smart thing is link into 3D with Google Earth. Read on…

When you upload a photo to Panoramia you get the option of picking the place in the world where it was taken. This will not instantly appear to other web users – the company has an approval process that takes around a month, which I guess is to insure against unsuitable content and just plain wrong locations.

While awaiting approval, however, you can still see the images on your own local Google Earth, and also send the links to other users. For example, the following image shows one of mine:

This is a screenshot from Google Earth that shows a small thumbnail of a beach shot I took when in Australia a few years ago. It is just a test image I uploaded to Panoramia.

Note that if you zoom in using Google Earth, then all the small blue balls change to the camera symbols mentioned earlier and shown in the next image:

Finally, if you click on either the thumbnail or one of the camera symbols you will get a Panoramia window popping up that shows a bigger version of the image along with a few other options.

In my case, clicking on the beach scene shows a much larger version of the image wrapped in the Panoramia pop window. You can see this below.

At the moment I have only put this single file on Panoramio. I want to look through some of the pictures I’ve taken over the years and put them on the map. I think the standard tourist places have been done to death, so I’ll look to find some locations that either do not have many existing images, or that are significantly different from the ones already posted. If you want to keep up with my images, then look at my Panoramia page, or just search for user “gwhitfield”.

It is worth mentioning that even if you never intend to post any of your own photos the site is worth a browse – there are some simply stunning images. Looking at pictures of places you are familiar provides some interesting perspectives, not to mention a little envy at how good other people are with their cameras! For any keen photographer or happy snapper, the Panoramia stuff is well worth a browse. But for the best experience do it via Google Earth as described earlier.

Panoramia was recently acquired by Google so expect to see much more innovation coming out.

In my dreams….

What I would really like to see is a link up between Panoramia and the geolocation feature in Adobe Photoshop Elements 5. For those not familiar with Elements, it provides a way you can tag the location photos were taken. But it uses flat Yahoo Maps, and there is no uploading involved – it is all local to your PC which makes sharing difficult. What would be great is the ability to upload and link directly to Google Earth via Panoramia.

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As a follow up to my previous post about using Google Maps in conjunction with your own GPS data, you can also do the same thing in Google Earth. Something I missed before was that the same GPSVisualizer site provides the service so that you upload your GPS file, and it generates a Google KMZ file for you. Click on it, and the file gets downloaded and launched in Google Earth directly. Very neat and very easy. Here’s a screenshot:

The purple line is the overlayed GPS track. As you can see from the loop at the right edge, I had to turn around – the road was closed by flooding.

A difference between this approach in Google Earth to that of Google Maps is it is easier to share the information in the latter. People don’t need anything other than a web browser, and you do not need to send them a data file.

I did see somewhere a GPS track overlay in Google Earth that rendered it as 3D – the height of the track related to speed. If I can find it and make it work, I’ll post back here.

Now, all I need is to find a way in GE that I can measure the length of a GPS track and I’ll be extremely happy. It would be great to go for a walk, bike ride, or a drive; plugin your GPS data, and calculate how far exactly you had been and see data such as elapsed time between points. Then do this a number of times with different routes and you will get a very intuitive way of analysing best routes over a period of time.

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I’ve been dabbling with Google Maps recently as I want to download some GPS data from my PDA to visualise and analyse journeys that I have made. I also think Google Maps and its 3D sibling Google Earth are the absolute dogs doodads of applications and so any excuse to play with these was welcome.

I started with a .GPS file that was generated automatically by Copilot, which is the in-car satellite navigation software that I use. It’s pretty good, but like all Satnav systems you need to be aware of its foibles to get the best out of it. Never, ever, simply follow the instructions!

The GPS track was a record of my travels on Monday 25th June as I tried to get into work in Sheffield as it was getting hit by freak floods. Getting in was OK(ish), but took a long time. Getting home again was a bit more interesting as I kept trying to avoid all the bad traffic.

Anyway, since I was being forced to turn around and try new routes to avoid flooded roads, jams etc, I wanted to see on my PC where I had been. What I did not know was a quick and easy way to do it.

Copilot has a PC hosted planning application, but that won’t take the GPS tracks that the PDA version generates (sigh….). Ideally I wanted to put the tracks into Google Earth to look at in glorious 3D, but I currently only have the free version that does not allow GPS tracks to be imported.

A quick webhunt brought up GPS Visualizer. This provides a free service that allows me to upload the GPS file, and it generates a Google Map with a vector overlay of the results. Even better, the site contains instructions on hosting the resulting map on your own website.

So I had a go at this. The HTML pathway was a huge faff, to be honest, as I was rather foolishly trying to use Frontpage. The problem was that it was trying to be too smart on the Cut and Paste operation, which screwed HTML tags over. In the end, a quick path was to:

1. View GPS Visualizer page source
2. Save source to local HTML file on disk
3. Open HTML with an editor. Even Frontpage could manage this bit!
4. Locate the Google API key, and replace it with my own (see below).
5. Set page titles, modify the default 600×600 window
6. Upload to my website

The resulting page can be seen here.

If you want to do this yourself you’ll need a Google API key, which you can get from here