I love the new Google Earth Project capability and encourage everyone to try it out and make their (small) first project. Yesterday, I shared my own very first #GoogleEarth Project on Local Guides Connect and promised to write a dedicated post about some of my observations.
#1 Desktop versus Mobile
First of all, many people don’t seem to realize that you can only create and edit a Google Earth Project on a desktop computer. If you don’t possess one, you may find them available for public use in your local Library.
The issue that I already discussed and demonstrated in my earlier post (and somewhat to my frustration) is that I spent a lot of time fine-tuning the Google Earth captures as part of the design of my project. If you have never built one, you may wonder, what I am talking about. I may not be using all the right terminology in this “How to” but I shall illustrate my point.
Here is an example on desktop (how it was built by me):
On the right inside the black column, you see a picture that I took of the church and my text. On the left, you see Google Earth showing you the church that I am featuring in my project. When I created this item in the project, I had full control of how I wanted the “Google Earth part” to look like. In other words, I played around with the angle (when it was 3D) zoomed in or out and framed it to my desire. Like being in control of a camera and deciding when to click and freeze the result, you capture what you wish Google Earth to look like.
I spent a fair bit of time playing around and deciding what I like best, making decisions like a movie director. So you can probably imagine my disappointment when I looked at the same item in the project on mobile device…
In the Google Earth frame of the page, you now only see part of the church building and a lot of street outside the building that is not relevant. So, currently, until the GE Team fixes this issue, we have to decide to either optimize our project for desktop or for mobile. I can see the challenge for GE developers, as the canvas on a desktop is very different from the canvas on a mobile device. I guess the solution is to allow users to capture canvasses for both types of devices.
So, currently, we have to decide to either optimize our project for desktop or for mobile.
Given the time I spent to get it perfect (in my eyes) for desktop and because I most likely will look at my project for joy mostly on desktop, I shall leave my first project as it is. However, when your target audience uses mostly mobile, please don’t waste your time by making it look good on your desktop. Optimize it directly for mobile users.
My next Google Earth Project, I shall optimize for mobile and I shall report back to you how easy or difficult this optimization in practice is.
2# Landscape Photos Still Need Optimization
For the best results in Google Earth Projects, you need to only use Landscape photos. Portrait-oriented images look like this:
As you can see in the screenshot above, you get large bars of out of focus background on both sides of your portrait-oriented-image to fill the canvas.
But even when you use photos that are in landscape, I found that (for perfectionists) it requires further optimization. Unfortunately, I have not found any reference to the image-size to upload in the official manual. I am going to try to find out, but perhaps a Googler can help us? ( @Petra_M )
Let me illustrate my point with the following screenshots:
The Google Earth User Interface does currently not offer any capability to crop your image. So without further guidelines on how to optimize our photos for Google Earth Projects, it is going to be hit or miss.
#3 Google Photos Integration
When adding photos to Google Earth it is possible to add photos from your Google Photos collection. That is great right? So I thought…
The following issue was almost a deal-breaker for me. I was getting close to downloading all my project photos from Google Photos to my laptop and then uploading them to my Google Earth Project. Why? Because somehow when you search your Google Photos inside Google Earth, you don’t get the same search results as in Google Photos. I tried everything: searching by date, describing the content, using the location tag of my photos as a keyword to filter, etc. But nope, most of the time the photos that perfectly showed up inside my search in Google Photos would not appear in the search results in Google Earth.
Not to worry, I found an easy solution. Go to Google Photos and open each photo that you wish to use in your project. Now add a description to each photo that you wish to use and remember what you wrote, so you can search exactly for that phrase. When you planned your project, you could take notes and even create your own number system related to your project. After you “labeled” your photos, give it a little bit of time before you go search for them inside Google Earth. In my experience, a minute wait is plenty. In the meantime, you could work on something else. Now searching for your photo labels, the search does show you your desired photos.
#4 Full Screen Slides
These are awesome (!) and look very clean. Again, it would be nice to know what format photo to use, because when you use a standard photo, you will find that the app crops your image, without you having control over it.
Full Screen Slides are very powerful.
The Full Screen Slides take your viewers away from the Google Earth view. This allows you to get their full attention and communicate your message. The experience is a bit like a full-screen website with a beautiful fixed background photo and your text scrolling up and down. The Full Screen Slides are also ideal to create a slide with the credits of your project, as I did in mine here.
#5 Map Pointer
Another great feature is how you can fly from one step of your story to the next one that has a Street-View capture (read: as your Google Earth view). You need to see it in action as it is difficult to explain, but trust me, it is super cool. It makes your project way more interactive.
However, as I was building my project I came to realize that the Map Pointer (of each project item) can be moved. I did so accidentally after I had captured my Street-View canvas and ended up with my Map Pointer next to another project item that I was trying to edit. So keep in mind that the map pointer and your Google Earth view capture are totally independent. Make sure that all your Map Pointers relate indeed to what you present in the content (captures included). They can be easily moved in “edit mode” of each item.
Make sure that all your Map Pointers relate indeed to what you present in the content.
Of course, you are able to make an executive decision to play with this a little. In the following screenshot, you see the Map Pointer for my project item “Let’s Enter the Town”. When you click on it you fly to a Street View capture that is actually where it made the red X in the annotation. For my story, it made no sense to put the Map Pointer inside the town, given my title. However, I wanted the Street View to reflect the first thing you see when you have entered.
#6 Think Twice Before You Use (YouTube) Video
Google Earth Projects nicely integrates with YouTube. You don’t even have to look for the share link of your own videos, as they are presented to you in a special tab. So far so good.
Remember what I liked so much about the Full Screen Slides. How you get emerged in the slide, without the Google Earth view. When your project viewers click on one of your videos, to activate it to play, YouTube takes over with a full-screen overlay. People are enjoying your video but at the end of the video, as with the actual YouTube app, it shows recommended videos or other videos of your channel!
This is totally undesirable, as it is very distracting from your story AND potentially take your viewers away from your Google Earth content. On the positive side, this “weakness” could for some be an advantage as it may lead to subscribers to your own YouTube channel. When you have lots of different types of YouTube videos for different target groups, you would need to think about separating your YouTube content to always present your content to the right target group.
#6 Avoid Street View with Lines
Ones you start drawing lines on the Google Earth canvas, they also appear inside Street View mode. Unfortunately, the app has not (yet) been calibrated to do so correctly. It is best to illustrate with screenshots what I am talking about.
The floating yellow line is not correctly displayed. It should be a simple straight line going beyond the castle.
#8 Your Narrative
This time one is fully on me. When creating a Google Earth Project you may want to step back and plan it. That is not what I did, as I was too keen to get hands-on experience. I did not think much about my narrative. Is your story going to be in the first person? Is it in the moment or looking back?
Because I didn’t plan you may find my Google Earth Story inconsistent.
As you can see, my titles are all about: let’s do something together now. Yet, in my story boxes, I talk about me, you or we al the time.
#9 Navigation
The Google Earth Project User Interface provides great navigation. Yet, I personally found that I prefer to add navigational links inside my story boxes to keep the flow going. The app lets you decide what to do with your internal links. I have yet to try them all out and only used the “Fly to and show the feature’s panel content”.
In the above sample, I added a simple “Continue” link to make navigation easier. Of course, you can play with the text in the style of your story.
So, that is it for now. I am keen to start my second project and play with some of the other capabilities. I sincerely hope that my learning curve will prevent you from some trouble and be more efficient. Hopefully, we can sort the image format issue as discussed in #2.
I would very much appreciate it if we could stick together and learn from each other’s build experiences. To do so, I have created a #CommunityChallenge. It is presented as a competition, but really the main ethos is to encourage each other, get inspired and learn in the process.
So when you share your Google Earth Project build, please use the hashtag in your post and submit a link to your post with a link to your project under one of the following categories.
#CommunityChallenge Categories:
- Meet-Up Promo
- Meet-Up Recap
- Local Guides Community Showcase
- My World (for individuals only)
- Google Maps List
- Special Interest Theme
