Using Places
Once you are familiar with the basics of marking places on the Earth, you can refer to this section to learn about all of the features available to you in the Places panel. This section includes the following topics:
Organising Place Data
You can organise your saved data in the Places panel in the same way you organise files and folders on your computer's hard drive. This section covers the following:
Creating Folders
You can create folders and move other folders, placemarks or shapes to them. To create a folder:
- Right-click a folder in the Places panel.
- Select Add > Folder from the pop-up menu. The folder that you right-clicked is automatically set as the container for the new folder.
Once the New Folder dialogue box appears, you can set the following fields:
- Name
- Description - Enter a description for the folder. For example, you might enter text that gives a general description of all of the placemarks in the folder. The first few words of the description appear below the folder in the Places panel. When you double-click the folder, the description appears in a balloon in the 3D viewer. In addition, you can use a number of HTML tags to format your description and include images, including <b></b>, <br>, <img src="..."> and <a href="...">. See Writing Descriptions.
- Style/Colour - Once you have other icons within the new folder (or its subfolders), the Style/Colour tab is available. You can use this feature to apply label and icon styles universally across all items within the folder. See Editing Places and Folders for more information.
- View - See Setting the View for details. Once you set a view for a folder, double-clicking the folder repositions the 3D viewer to the position that you have chosen. Setting a view for a folder is useful when you want to create a viewing angle to encompass all of the items contained in the folder. For example, you might have a collection of placemarks in a specific region of the city, each with an independent viewing angle. You can place them all in a folder and set a viewing angle for the folder in order to display all of the placemarks from a consistent viewing angle, if desired.
Reordering Placemarks or Folders
You can reposition a placemark or folder in three ways:
- Drag it to a new position in a list of items.
- Drag and drop it over a folder.
- Right-click (CTRL-click on the Mac) the item and select Cut from the pop-up menu. Then right-click the new position or folder and select Paste from the pop-up menu.
In this way, you can put placemarks within newly created folders or you can move an entire folder and its contents into another folder to create groups of folders.
Note: If you move a folder so that it is inside the
Temporary Places main folder, you must save that data if you want it to be available the next time you start Google Earth. If you exit Google Earth without saving the folder, a dialogue box prompts you to save the information to your
My Places folder. See
Saving Place Data for details.
Renaming a Placemark or Folder
To quickly rename an item, right-click (CTRL-click on the Mac) it and select Rename from the pop-up menu. You can enter the new name directly in the name field. You can also:
- Choose Rename from the Edit menu if the item is selected in the list
- (Windows and Linux only) Select the item and press F2 on the keyboard
Removing a Placemark or Folder
To delete an item, right-click (CTRL-click on the Mac) the entry and select Delete from the pop-up menu, or select Delete from the Edit menu when the item is selected in the Places panel. A confirmation dialogue box asks if you want to delete the placemark or folder. If you delete a folder, you also delete all of its contents, including other folders and icons. Click Yes to confirm the deletion.
Saving Place Data
You can save placemarks, shapes and entire folders (and their contents) to your computer's hard drive. The placemark file or folder is saved as a single file in KMZ format, which you can open at any time in Google Earth. You might want to do this for the following reasons:
- You want to share the saved data with other Google Earth users. You can email any placemark, shape or folder to another Google Earth user from within Google Earth, but you can also email any KMZ file located on your computer to a Google Earth user. In addition, you can post a KMZ file to the Google Earth BBS where other Google Earth users can view the information, or you can serve the file on your own web server or from any network location. See Sharing Place Information for details.
- You have so many places in your My Places folder that Google Earth is slow to start up. Each time you start Google Earth, all of the place data is processed during start-up, even if it is not turned on in the 3D viewer. Holding a large amount of data in the My Places folder can impact the performance of Google Earth, depending on your computer. By saving folders to your hard drive, you can improve Google Earth performance by then deleting the data from your My Places folder once they are saved to disk. You can always open the data that you save at any time.
Save individual placemarks, shapes or entire folders by right-clicking (CTRL-clicking on the Mac) the item and selecting Save As from the pop-up menu.
Use the File dialogue box to save the placemark or folder to your computer. Enter the name for the new file and click Save in the dialogue box. The placemark or the folder is saved to that location with an .kmz extension.
Important: Placemarks created with Google Earth version 3.0 or higher cannot be viewed in older versions of Google Earth. As an alternative, you can send an image file. See
Saving Images for details.
Opening Saved Placemarks
You can use the following methods to open placemarks and folders saved to the file system on your computer's hard drive.
- From the File menu, select Open. Navigate to the folder on your computer that contains the KMZ or KML data that you want to open in Google Earth. Select the file and click the Open button. The folder or placemark appears beneath the Temporary Places folder and the 3D viewer flies to the view set for the folder or placemark (if any).
- Locate the file that you want to open. Once you have located the file on your computer, you can simply drag and drop the KMZ file over the Places panel or 3D viewer. The 3D viewer loads the file and flies to the view set for the folder or placemark (if any).
Tip: When you use the drag-and-drop method of opening a placemark or folder, you can drop the item over a specific folder in the Places panel. If the My Places folder is closed and you want to drop it there, just hold the item over the My Places folder until the folder opens up and you can place the item within subfolders or in the list. Items dropped in the My Places folder appear the next time you start Google Earth. Otherwise, you can drop the item in the Temporary Places folder. Items opened this way only appear for the current session of Google Earth unless you save them.
Deleting Place Data
There are a number of ways of removing data from the Places panel:
- Delete - Right-click (CTRL-click on the Mac) a placemark, folder or other item in the Places panel and select Delete from the pop-up menu. You can also delete items in the 3D viewer by right-clicking (CTRL-clicking on the Mac) the icon and selecting Delete from the pop-up menu. This deletes the item from the Places panel. If the item is located in your Temporary Places folder, it does not appear the next time you use Google Earth. If you have previously saved the item, you can always open the saved data at any time. Otherwise, the item is removed permanently.
- Delete Key - With the item selected in the Places panel, press the Delete key. A dialogue box asks you to confirm the deletion. Click OK to remove the item from the Places panel.
- Delete Contents - Right-click (CTRL-click on the Mac) a folder and select Delete Contents from the pop-up menu. Click Yes on the confirmation dialogue box to proceed with deleting the contents. All folder contents are removed, including any subfolders and contained items.
- Cut Contents (Ctrl-X) - Right-click (CTRL-click on the Mac) an item in the Places panel and select Cut from the pop-up menu, or right-click a placemark in the 3D viewer and select Cut. The item is removed from the listing or view, but copied to the clipboard, so that you can paste it to a different location later.
Showing and Hiding Place Data
Once you begin collecting a fair amount of place data, you can use the show/hide features of Google Earth to quickly manage the amount of content that is visible in the 3D viewer.
To hide place data, tick or un-tick the checkbox next to an item. To turn off the display for a single placemark or overlay in the 3D viewer, click the item to remove the tick. To turn on a single item, tick the checkbox. For entire folders, you can turn on all items in the folder by ticking the folder's checkbox if it is not already ticked. In this case, all items in the folder are turned on. A subsequent click turns off all items in the folder.
Note - If a square 
appears in the checkbox for a folder, this indicates that some (but not all) of the items within that folder are currently displayed.
