Thursday, November 15, 2012

How to show pictures along tracks in Google Maps

I have a number of pictures in Picasa. All of them have been geotagged. The maps in Picasa can show the pictures but it does not have the route that I have gone through while taking the pictures.

Sports-Tracker app did allow the showing of the routes with the pictures. I was thinking in the same line and thus was scratching my head as to how should I go about doing it.

By trial and error, I found in Picasa a link that says "View in Google Earth". Clicking on it actually create a kml file in my local directory. It then occur me to import this into the maps that I create in "My Places". When I did this, the pictures actually showed in the map exactly as in Picasa's map. Clicking on the picture icons will show a larger picture as a pop up.

First go to your particular album. Click on the "View Map" at the bottom right hand corner. When the map with the pictures are shown, click on "View in Google Earth". A KML will be saved in your directory.

I then export my route as "tracks" gpx. Using gpx2kml.com, I converted it to kml and imported this also into the same map I created earlier. And what you know? It appears exactly as in Sports-tracker.

Even if I do not have the GPS track recorded while in the trip. I could easily create the tracks by manually plotting the route. It worked just fine.

With the pictures and the route. The next thing is to add Markers where you can state when you were at that spot and a description of the spot. This makes a perfect Trip Logger record.

A word of caution. If you have way too many pictures, your map will become paged thus spoiling the fun. See my earlier post about showing such paged map in one place.

Finally, you may have to delete the "description". Google may complain that the string is too long. Anyhow, the html cannot be displayed properly thus deleting it is always a sensible thing to do.

You may want to put titles in Picasa for individual pictures. It will be imported as marker title.


No comments:

Post a Comment