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User Guide

Marking Places

When you first start Google Earth, the Places panel contains an empty My Places folder to hold places that you want to save. (If you are upgrading from a previous version of Google Earth, Google Earth imports your saved places.) Every item located in the My Places folder is saved for subsequent Google Earth sessions. Items located in the Places panel but not saved in the My Places folder are located in the Temporary Places folder and are unavailable in the next Google Earth session if you do not move or save them to your My Places folder.

You can use the Places panel to save and organize places that you visit, address or listing searches, natural features, and more.

This section covers the basic ways to add a placemark to the My Places folder:

For more information on other things you can do with placemarks, see Using Places.

Tip: If Google Earth takes a long time to load, you might have more places saved than your computer can reasonably handle. Try moving some of the places you don't regularly visit to a folder and saving that folder to your computer. See Saving and Sharing Places.

Creating a New Placemark

Tip - Follow a tutorial on this subject or watch the following video:

Follow these instructions to add a new placemark to any spot in the viewer.

  1. Position the 3D viewer to contain the spot you want to placemark. Consider zooming into the best viewing level for the desired location. Choose any one of the following methods:
    • Select Placemark from the Add Menu.
    • Click the Placemark icon on the toolbar menu at the the top of the screen
      Pushpin icon
    The New Placemark dialog box appears and a New Placemark icon is centered in the viewer inside a flashing yellow square. Position the placemark. To do this, position the cursor on the placemark until the cursor changes to a pointing finger and drag it to the desired location. The cursor changes to a finger pointing icon to indicate that you can move the placemark.

    Position the placemark

    You can also lock the placemark position or set advanced coordinates for its position. Set the following properties for the new placemark:
    • Name for the placemark
    • Description, including HTML text (see Writing Descriptions)
    • Style, Color - Choose a color, scale (size) and opacity for the placemark icon
    • View - Choose a position for the placemark. For explanation of terms in this tab, mouse over each field. Click Snapshot current view to apply the current view (altitude and camera angle) to this placemark.
    • Altitude - Choose the height of the placemark as it appears over terrain with a numeric value or the slider. Choose Extend to ground to show the placemark attached to a line anchored to the ground.
    • (Icon) - Click the icon for the placemark (top right corner of the dialog box) to choose an alternate icon.
  2. Click OK to apply the information you entered in the placemark dialog box.

Your placemark appears in the 3D viewer and as an entry in the selected folder. Once you save this placemark, you can always change its position and properties. See Editing Places and Folders for more information.

Saving a Point of Interest

You can save any point of interest (POI) displayed in the 3D viewer to the My Places folder by right-clicking (CTRL clicking on the Mac) on the placemark in the viewer and selecting Save to My Places from the pop-up menu.

You can also use the copy feature as follows:

  1. Right-click (CTRL click on the Mac) on a POI and select Copy from the pop-up menu.
  2. Open the My Places folder to display the destination folder for the POI.
  3. Position your cursor over the desired folder or sub-folder.
  4. Right-click (CTRL click on the Mac) and select Paste from the pop-up menu. The POI appears in the location you selected.

See Showing and Hiding Points of Interest for more information on viewing points of interest in the 3D viewer.

You can also move a saved POI to any folder in your Places panel. See Organizing Places for more information.

Sharing a Placemark

After you have created a placemark, you can easily share it with others on the Google Earth Community BBS website. To do this, right click (CTRL click on the Mac) on the placemark and choose Share/Post. The Google Earth Community posting wizard appears in a browser window at the bottom of your screen. Follow the instructions on this web page to post information about this placemark on the Google Earth BBS.

Note - You can also share information that appears in Google Earth via KML files.

Saving Search Results

After you perform a search, a listing results panel also appears below the Search button. Each search term you enter is the title for the folder containing the top 10 results within it. You can collapse a particular search folder by clicking on the minus icon next to the search term. While you are logged in, you can revisit your search results just by double-clicking on an item in the search list. You can clear search results from the listing by clicking on the Clear button (X).

Once you log out of Google Earth, your search terms are cleared. However, you can save search results for future Google Earth sessions in the following ways:

Tip: You can also save the contents of the entire search result to the Places panel by selecting the folder containing your search results and dragging it to the desired location.

Once a search result is saved, you can change its title, location, and description. See Editing Placemark or Folder for information.

Saving Images

Note - This feature is available to users of the Google Earth Pro and Google Earth EC products. Visit http://earth.google.com/products.html for more information.

Use File > Save > Save Image to save the current view as an image file to your computer's hard drive. When you save an image, a Save dialog box appears and you can locate a folder on your computer to save the image to, just as you would for any document you might save. The image is saved with all visible placemarks, borders, or other Layer information visible in the 3D viewer.

You can save images in the following resolutions:

Google Earth PRO/EC users can save images in the following resolutions:

Printing

Use the Print... command under the File menu to print the current view. You can also type Ctrl (Command/Open Apple Key on the Mac) + P. When you print an image, a Print dialog box appears that asks you to choose one of the following:

Note - Some of these printing options are only available to Google Earth Pro and EC users.

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