Day trip to Joshua Tree

[Robthebrit]

On December 30th I took a day trip to Joshua Tree, the trip was mainly to test my new Canon 5D but also to give the mog a drive as its been sitting on the driveway for quite a while and I got to see some really beautiful scenery in the process.

I have been experimenting with Google Earth's self contained KMZ files, these are available on a few other websites and they are simply awesome for documenting trips. A single downloaded contains the track, user notes and geo-coded photo waypoints (if you have Exif info it can extract data fields from those). Another huge benefit is you can easily get driving directions to either end of the trail (or any other way points along the way) by clicking on the way point and selecting 'driving directions to here', no more bad directions to trails. Finally of course its all within Google Earth so you can zoom around the trail looking at the details.

Here are a couple I have made so far, I resized the photos to 800x600 to keep the size of the downloads to something reasonable (they are around 5.5mb each).

http://www.robanddenise.com/travels/jtnp/berdoocanyon.kmz
http://www.robanddenise.com/travels/jtnp/geologytourroad.kmz

When the files are first loaded the track is not shown, you have to go to the tool window at the side to enable it. Also in some locations there are multiple photos in the same place which seems to cause problems within the user interface. If you have problems go to the tool window and disable the photo waypoints that are in the way of others. I am still trying to come up with a better solution for this.

These files can also contain the actual GPS sample points from which Google Earth can compute the bearing, speed, time remaining. My files do not contain the sample points (the track is shows as a polyline) as the UI issues get worse.

There should be a section on the site where we can post these files so others who wish to drive the same trails can benefit from them. Let me know what you think and if there is enough interest I'll make a tutorial on how to put them together.

I will post the original full size pictures to my site so you guys who are interested in the camera can look at them (they are huge), I'll also post the track files etc.

Rob

 

[Robthebrit]

I figured out that by twiddling with the XML you can get google maps to display these files in a regular web broswer, complete with track, photos and user info. Google Earth NOT required.

Try this link (there are still a few formatting issues on the photos, the size is limited to 640x480 otherwise it will not fit in the popup bubble)

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=...85,-116.099567&spn=0.132297,0.215607&t=h&om=1


Rob

 

[slooowr6]

:clapsmile
very cool feature, is there a how-to page in google earth for putting a file like this together?
________
CRF230M

 

[MountainBiker]

That is a great feature of Google Earth!
BTW, I was on Berdoo just a couple days before you:
http://www.expeditionportal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3525&page=2

 

[Scott Brady]

Looks like a great trip Rob. I look forward to seeing some of the pictures :lurk:

 

[Robthebrit]

They are great photos, I like the cloudy ones. I was hoping for some clouds but all I got was brilliant sunshine.

Here is the deal with Google Earth and Google Maps:

Thier file format is .KML which is an XML file and can handle pretty much anything we would ever want to do with it (tracks, lines, bounding volumes, photos, html, external links etc), its fully documented on google.com. My file consists of a poly line to represent the track and its derived from a simplified version of the GPS track. A second section of the file lists the the photo locations as waypoints, there is an embedded block of html that is displayed in the bubble when you click on the waypoint. From testing, it appears this HTML can be anything you like, in my file its just some text for the description and an external jpeg for the image.

To get the web version of google maps on any browser to display a KML file, simply go to maps.google.com and in the search window enter the fully qualified web path to your KML file and thats it, google does the rest.

The stand alone .KMZ files are zipped KML file and I mean they are literally zipped files. If you rename the .KMZ to .ZIP you can expand it with regular zip tools. All KMZ files contian a KML file (at the root level) called doc.kml and this is the KML file that google earth will open when the KMZ file is loaded, if you do not have a doc.kml file then the file will fail to load. The zip contains all the files that are referenced by the KML, the zip can contain as many files as you like in any folder structure you like, regardless of how you make them the end result is a stand alone file.

Some of the files I posted were created by RoboGeo which is photo/gps geo stamping app, it also happens to export to google earth (and many other web formats). There are many other apps that do the same thing including google earth itself if you have the patience to place all the photos manually.

I'll put together a detailed tutorial and may Scott will post it to the site for everybody to access.

Rob