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How to Use Google Earth Web as a Presentation Tool

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Google Earth isn’t just a cool navigation tool. You can also use it for presentations that involve real-life locations. The app already has a built-in feature just for that purpose.

Let’s say you’re a travel journalist and you want to be able to demonstrate where you’ve been around the world when pitching to new clients. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to create such presentations on Google Earth.

1. Get Google Earth and Drive

You can now use Google Earth on any browser , not just Chrome. If you’ve never tried the app before, you can find out more about it by visiting the Google Earth website. From there, hit the Launch Earth button to log in with your Google account.

Also, the app mainly uses Google Drive to store the projects you create, so it’s a good idea to set up an account before making your first presentation.

2. Launch Google Earth and Find the Projects Tool

Once you’ve signed in to Google Earth, our digital planet will appear on your screen with several features on the left sidebar, such as map styles and Google’s tool for measuring area and distance .

Select the Projects icon and, assuming you don’t already have a presentation, click Create and then choose whether you want to store the new project on Google Drive or as a KML file—it stands for Keyhole Markup Language, an XML file that contains geographic information.

As the easiest method, go for the Google Drive option and wait for Google Earth to link up to your account. Once you create a project, click its Pin to Earth icon to make sure you can always find it when logging in.

3. Give Your Project a Title and Description

Take the time to name and describe your new presentation by filling in the two available fields. If nothing else, they can help you remember the purpose or details of each project.

On your dashboard, you have a few more options above your title and description. You can share, reload, or delete the project, as well as copy it, download it as a KML file, or report it for inappropriate content, the last being more useful to visitors.

4. Add Places to Your Google Earth Presentation

Under your project’s title and description is the New feature button, which opens a menu of many more tools. To pin locations of interest, you can either use Search to add place or Add placemark . The latter is especially good if the location you want is too obscure for Google to find.

A location you searched for will already display some details provided by Google, which you can change by clicking Replace . Your own placemarks are blank from the start.

A third option is to zoom in on a location, enter Street View , and click Capture this view . You can then add the place to your project after editing its details. Use this to get Google Earth’s satellite view of your house or a landmark from your travels worth sharing.

All three methods let you edit the locations you choose. This includes:

• Naming and describing them
• Editing the typeface
• Adding images and videos
• Personalizing your placemark’s icon and color
• Choosing the size of your info box
• Previewing the location’s display

When happy, just click the Back arrow—Google automatically saves your project. Every location you add to your presentation joins its list of markers, which you can easily select and edit as necessary.

5. Connect Places With Lines

As a travel journalist, you may want to demonstrate the number of flights you took from your home base in the last year or the stops you made during a long road trip. You can use Google Earth’s lines tool for this.

To do so, select Draw line or shape from the New feature menu. Click the places you want to mark, and lines will automatically appear between them.

Hit Enter to save the shape you made and access its editor. If you close your shape into a square or triangle, for example, you can customize its filling as well as its outline.

Another tool to make your project interesting is the Tilt the view button, which shifts your angle between 2D and 3D. While in a place’s editor, choose the best viewpoint and click Capture this view —that’s what you’ll get when you jump to the location in your presentation.

6. Add Slides to Your Presentation

If you take pictures on your travels, you can add them to your Google Earth presentation to share the people and scenery you encounter and create stories from your travel writing.

In the New feature menu, select Fullscreen slide . Upload your image or video, add whatever text you want, choose a background color, and preview the slide.

Add several of these visuals throughout the presentation to enrich the experience. This is especially useful for more creative projects on Google Earth , like teaching or planning a book.

7. Move Your Presentation’s Features Around

When you have all the places, lines, and slides you need for your project, hold and move each item up or down the list to adjust its order.

The presentation will play from the top to the bottom, so how you lay out all your items affects the impact and flow of your presentation.

If you want to skip an item when presenting, click the Hide feature icon next to it. To bring it back, use the same icon.

Note that you can also create folders through the New feature menu, but they interfere with the presentation, so you’re better off using them to store unused items instead of hiding them individually.

8. Present Your Project

With everything in order, hit the Present button. Unfortunately, Google Earth isn’t PowerPoint, so you can’t automate or speed up transitions, animate text and images, and so on. There are also limits to how often Google Earth is updated .

However, you still end up with a very cool presentation that flies from place to place around the globe, occasionally broken up by slides that could contain photos or even graphs, depending on what you’re presenting as a travel journalist.

Keep in mind that jumping between locations can be dizzying, so choose your presentation’s items carefully, as well as how much detail you add to them and what view you capture for each place.

Take Projects to the Next Level With Google Earth’s Presentation Tool

While there are many better options when it comes to presentation design software, Google Earth is one of the best tools for visualizing geographic themes.

Whether your interest is travel, ecology, history, or culture, keep learning how Google’s advanced map features can deliver the most engaging experience possible.

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How to Use Google Earth to Enhance Your Presentations

I’m a frequent user of Google Earth to help enrich my presentations in front of large and demanding audiences. When introducing a new and exotic location, I find nothing beats an attractive and useful map or satellite image.

How many times have you watched a travel video wishing they’d included a map to provide some idea of location? — especially in these days of exploding numbers of YouTube travel vloggers!

How Can You Provide Geographic Context in Presentations?

Television news studios have been doing this for ages, and now you have the tools to do it yourself. What do I mean?

How many times have you seen a news story where the camera appears to zoom towards a particular location on earth as an intro shot? In the old days, this would have been nearly impossible for an individual at home with their own computer.

Here’s a quick example of the type of geographic context I like to provide in my own travel videos .

Google earth provides excellent tutorial videos .

Introducing satellite fly-overs in your presentations can be daunting at first.  Once you begin to experiment with the tools available, I think you’ll begin to see that it is time well spent.  I would say that you could produce your first Google Earth fly over in a couple of hours.

It took me days of experimenting when I first began to use Google Earth Pro, but I didn’t have the benefit of the excellent video tutorials that Google provides today.  

Google Earth Tutorial: Intro to Creation Tools

Here’s a short tutorial intro to an excellent series of videos on a simple approach to incorporating satellite images into your own presentations:

In my work, I frequently use Google Earth Pro to produce video flyovers.  I really enjoy the fact that I can zoom into any location on earth and, if the resolution of the image is good enough, I can take my audience on a quick tour by following a particular geographic feature such as a shoreline or river, circling a mountain peak, or hopping from one island to the next. Pro is a free stand alone program that you can download onto your system.

Here’s one of my own short videos as an example. I’ve used Google Earth Pro to provide visual context to each location in the area surrounding Cape Town, South Africa. This is one of our favorite cities in the entire world with its stunning scenery and lovely climate.

If you don’t want to set up Google Earth Pro on your computer, you have an easy solution:  Google Earth Studio.

Google Earth Studio is Quick and Easy

Google has added a user-friendly way of producing animated fly-overs using google earth studio, which works directly in the chrome browser. .

Here’s a quick video introduction, the first of a series on using Google Earth Studio. 

Tips on Using Google Earth Studio

Tip #1 – my number one tip for google earth studio:.

In order to use them, you have to take all those hundreds of images and import them into your video editing program.

Once in my editing program (I use PowerDirector), I find that the duration for each jpeg has to be extremely short if you want to have a properly paced video that doesn’t drag along at slow speed. 

My second tip – watch some good tutorial videos before going whole hog on your own production!

You can literally save yourself hours and hours of experimenting by learning from the pros. 

Cinematic Affects using Google Earth Studio 

Here’s a great intro from TMS Productions on using Google Earth Studio in films and presentations. In this case TMS imports the images into Adobe After Effects, but you could do the same using any video editing software (I use Cyberlink Power Director – powerful yet user friendly).

Google Earth View Provides Thousands of Stunning Images

For a quick intro check out this video:

Many of these images have an other worldly quality to them – with amazing colors, textures, and shapes that verge on the abstract. For adding visual interest to your presentations they are hard to beat!

Google Earth View provides an excellent source for stunning images, with over 2,000 images to choose from.  Not only do these satellite images make great wallpaper for your computer screen, they can make great full frame slides to use in your presentations! 

As you can see there are thousands of locations available throughout the the world, and half the fun is clicking on these dots to see what comes up. Don’t be surprised if you get totally distracted!

Best of luck with producing your own images and videos using these exciting tools to provide geographic context and stunning visuals in your own presentations.

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Fundamentals of Google Earth Pro

8 GISP Credit Hours

• Google Earth Fundamentals
• Creating Basic Features (Placemarks, Polylines, Polygons)
• Attaching Information to Features
• Overlay Images on Google Earth
• Creating 3D Views
• Geocoding Addresses
• Demographics, Parcels, Traffic Counts
• Creating Elevation Profiles and Viewsheds
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• Using Historical Imagery and Temporal Data

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Earth Outreach

Creating a narrated tour in google earth desktop, tutorial contents, prerequisites, let's get started, create a kml tour, re-record a tour to add new actions, recording narration, tips & tricks for touring, discussion and feedback, what's next.

Absolutely no programming skills needed!

In April 2017, Google Earth on Web was released, which puts Earth on the browser. However, for this tutorial, you will need Earth for Desktop installed on your computer. Download the latest version here .

Open Google Earth.

Download the sample data to use during this tutorial, and open it in Google Earth.

For this exercise, make the Terrain layer visible. Go to the Layers panel , and scroll to the bottom. Check the box next to Terrain to make it visible.

Now, let's record a tour!

The tour recording tools appear in the lower-left corner of the 3D viewer:

Create your tour by flying, zooming, panning, and rotating the globe. Do what you would do if you were showing your Google Earth project to a user or audience in person. A 3D Space Navigator, like the one created by 3D Connexion , can be extremely helpful for navigating smoothly across the globe.

Double-click on placemarks in the Places panel to move to their unique camera angle or view. In this example, double-click on the placemark 'Flirt', then 'Patti', and so on. You can also pop placemark balloons and turn on and off your placemarks, paths and polygons in the Places panel.

To save your KML Tour, click the Save to File button in the Tour Player, and give your KML Tour a name.

It is then stored in the Places panel.

To save it to a permanent .kmz file, right-click the tour in your Places panel, choose Save Places As… , and save your .kmz file to a location on your computer.

If you used content in your tour (clicked on placemarks, popped balloons, etc), you must put that content along with the tour into a single folder, and save that entire folder as a KMZ. Otherwise the file will have the tour only, and no content.

Want to add more actions to your tour? You can modify and extend a previous tour by re-recording a new tour while playing back the original tour.

Make sure your original tour is in the Places panel.

You can pause the original tour, add some new actions or camera movements, and then un-pause/play the original tour to continue. Note: if you move the earth during the pause of the original tour, when you hit play on the original tour the camera will jump to the where the original tour left off.

Once the original tour is done playing back, since you are still recording a new tour, you can continue to add new actions or even start playing back another tour!

To see what a completed tour looks like, download the finished product here

Audio recorded through your microphone is captured as an .mp3 file that is saved with the tour when you save it as a KMZ file.

Make sure when saving a Tour with audio narration to set the 'Save as Type' option in the Save window to KMZ, otherwise the audio will not be included in your file.

• When adding an iteration to an existing tour, you can click and hold on a location on the globe (i.e. building, mountaintop, etc.), and the camera will stay on that location, swiveling around it. When you un-click from that location, the previously recorded tour will continue as before.
• Navigation through time is captured in the tour, so if you drag the time slider while recording a tour, any actions that cause changes in the 3D viewer (appearing/disappearing points, animations, etc) will be recorded. For example, if you have Historical Imagery turned on (link), or have a time-animated KML in My Places, try recording a tour and also manipulating the time slider (in the upper left of the 3D map view). This allows you to make tours of time-animated layers, like the Declan Butler Avian Flu map, and also showing historic imagery from different time periods.
• KML Touring allows for more advanced actions than can be recorded by the simple Add Tour feature in Google Earth. This includes dynamically moving placemarks, lines and 3D models, adding pauses to the tour, and changing the styles of your features during the tour. However, you will need to hand-edit the KML to create these actions. Please see the Touring in KML documentation on the KML documentation site for more information.

Have questions about this tutorial? Want to give us some feedback? Visit the Google Earth Help Community to discuss it with others.

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