Google Earth Pro - A Complete Beginner’s Guide

hello guys welcome to this tutorial on the basics of google app through this tutorial i intend to give you guys a basic understanding of what google ad actually is and some of the basic functionalities which you can use if you're new or just getting started with google earth now google earth is a virtual representation of the earth as a globe which has a massive amount of data embedded within its system such as satellite and aerial imageries topographic information streets and road networks 3d representations of buildings and landmarks and so much more when it comes to different geographic information so before we dive in i'd like to show you how we can access google earth now currently you can access google earth via three methods you can access it as an application which works in your web browser well specifically chrome web browser or you can download it as an application onto your mobile device or even you can download it as a desktop application now for this tutorial i'm going to make use of the google earth pro desktop application right so let's open up our browser and you can directly go ahead and search google.com earth and now you can see that you're being greeted with this attractive landing page of google earth's website now from here what you're going to want to do is access different versions of google earth and you can do that simply by going over here to earth versions and as i mentioned to you guys before we get three choices google earth on web google earth on mobile and the option that i'm going to go with is google earth pro on desktop so i can simply click over here and i'll download this as a separate application so after i click on that i can just go ahead and download a pro on desktop just like this and you can simply accept and download from here all right once the executable file has been downloaded you can simply click on that in order for the installation to begin and once the installation is completed it will automatically open up google earth pro just like what you can see over here or if you want to separately open the application you can use your start menu and navigate to the google earth pro application now as i explained to you guys you can see that it's a virtual representation of the earth and you can see a couple of panels on the left side as well as some tools over here on the top and also over here on the right side you can see some tools as well now we'll be going over these tools at a level that's going to be sufficient enough for you to grasp the basic usages of google earth pro and well in the next tutorial we are going to dive a bit deeper into the advanced functionalities of the different tools all right to start off i'm going to discuss the navigating options in google earth now as you move your mouse point over the surface of the globe you can see that by default it has the look of a pan tool and when you click and hold your mouse button you can see that the hand is sort of grabbing on a certain point on earth and as you move your mouse around while holding the left mouse button you can see that the earth rotates accordingly now what i'm doing over here is i'm just moving my mouse to the left and right directions while the left mouse button is being pressed and you can see that the earth rotates accordingly to the direction that i wish to move it to and i think it won't take much time for you to realize that you're not really limited to the left and the right directions you actually don't have any limits when it comes to the direction to which you would like to rotate the earth just like this and while you're rotating if you happen to let go of the left click you can see that the globe will actually keep on spinning with the momentum you gave it and if you wish to stop that all you have to do is just click somewhere on the earth and that'll bring the spinning globe to a halt all right now we'll see how we can zoom into a location of our interest so i'm just going to reposition the wave just like this in a way that i could position uk at the center of my screen and if i want to zoom in there are a couple of ways of doing that if you're using a mouse with a scroll wheel you can see that as you scroll the wheel up it'll start zooming into the earth just like this and if you scroll down it will zoom out now while you're scrolling you can see that you can sort of guide the flying into movement by moving your mouse pointer around and zooming in and it'll sort of follow that for example let's say that i want to zoom into somewhere around sweden right over here while scrolling my mouse wheel up if i position my mouse pointer somewhere over here you can see that it's actually zooming into that area not really into uk anymore and similarly if i point my mouse over here somewhere in the middle of spain you can see that it's zooming in accordingly following the location where i place my mouse cursor all right let me go ahead and zoom out again now what i'm going to do is i'm going to use the same technique in order to zoom into the city of london just like this i would first place my mouse pointer over here and after that i can zoom in by scrolling my mouse wheel up and that will take me to the city of london as you can see over here and i can pan around the city just like this in order to have a clear view of the different buildings road networks parks basically all the companies that you can see in the city of london and in this manner we can almost get the feeling as if we were to just fly above the city while having a very detailed weave of the different components of the city all right now if you were to hold down the shift button and if you were to click on the left mouse button you will see that your cursor changes and now if you try to move your mouse up and down you can see that the movement which happens right now is not really the typical type of the movement which we were used to seeing so far but now you can see that we are able to change the weaving direction simply by tilting our weave just like this now if you were to move your mouse around you can see that the rotation happens around a certain axis and it lets us tilt the weave to any direction that we would like so that we can get some sort of a 3d view of the city of london just like this and now if you let go the shift button you can see that now you can actually pan around the city just like this in order to get a very clear weave and a very interesting view of the city with this kind of an angle i think you realize that the buildings are still actually flat and in order to activate 3d features of the building you can simply head over to this layers panel over here and you can check this 3d building's box and now look what happens you can see that the buildings in the map gets enabled with its 3d features and that transforms your entire weave into something completely different than what what it was before and now as you can see over here it looks almost as if you are moving through the city of london for real even though it's just a virtual journey that we are taking right now one thing you might notice is that as we approach different areas the buildings actually start getting loaded and this depends on the speed of your internet connection as well as the speed of your of your computer itself and as you can see over here if you again hold down the shift button you can move the map around just like this so that you can get a very clear 360 degree weave of the city in this kind of a very interactive manner all right now i'm going to head over to these different tools that you can see over here on the right side of the screen and what we just did actually everything that we just did in terms of navigating through different parts of the map can still be done using these tools as well so for example let me just go ahead and zoom out from this weave to sort of a top wave like this and if you move your mouse point over here it says that drag the slider or click the buttons to zoom in or out so as it explains if i were to click on this button or click on the slider and if i were to move it towards this plus sign you can see that it's actually basically zooming me into the into my area of interest just like this and similarly if i were to pull it towards the negative sign you can see that it's basically zooming me out from my area of interest and if you would like to move around your map you can simply use these buttons that you can see over here for example if i were to click on this arrow which points to the right side you can see that my entire view basically moves towards the right side and similarly if i were to click on the left side it moves towards the left side and it moves to the top and the bottom accordingly as well and again we're not really restricted to just these four directions let's say while you're moving to the right side if you decide to just move your mouse point just a little bit towards the northern side you can see that your direction changes accordingly so you basically have a 360 degree control when it comes to moving your map wave just like this and similarly this third tool that you can see over here it's basically an alternative tool to you having to hold your shift button and tilt your view now for example if i were to click on this arrow which points to the left side you can see that now it's rotating basically around the specific axis and if i click on this arrow which points to the right side the rotation happens to the opposite direction and what happens if i were to click on these arrows which points to up and down you can see that now the tilt happens as if i were to hold the shift button and move my mouse pointer down and the opposite happens if i were to click on this button right over here and similar to the previous tool that we discussed over here you again have a full freedom of actually playing around with this as you can see the movement happens according to the direction to which you would like to take your map weave just like this interesting isn't it all right so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to again zoom out and now let's talk about this layers panel now similar to many gis software packages google earth also uses the layer system to display these different components of this primary database which basically consists of things like borders and labels places photos roads 3d buildings and so on so we'll have a quick look at the borders and the labels first now you can see that by default this borders and labels checkbox has been activated and if i were to deactivate this you can see that the information that we had regarding the the political boundaries such as the borders of the countries borders of different cities and provinces everything disappears so those information can be simply controlled by activating or deactivating these borders and labels check box that you scan that you can see over here and if you would like to individually control for example let's say if you only want to keep the borders but take off the labels you can simply do that by expanding this just like this and even inside the borders you can control different types of borders that you would like to display or turn off as you can see over here you can turn on or off the international borders the country names the course lines and so on so i'm just going to go ahead and turn on the labels as well all right let me zoom in a little bit and not only that you can access a huge database of real pictures if you were to turn on this photos checkbox and as soon as you turn on that you can see that a number of photos appear over here so i can basically zoom into my area of interest let's say i'm going to zoom into somewhere over here in wales and if i were to click on one of these images or one of these icons it shows me a relevant image which was captured in that particular geographical location similarly let me just go ahead and move to a different place let's see if i were to zoom in again to london and you can see that it's a huge database of actual pictures but if you always keep it turned on then it can be a bit messy so i would recommend you to turn it off when you're doing other stuff and only if you intend to see a real picture in that case you can actually just navigate to the location of your interest and after that you can turn on these photos and then you can check whether google actually has a real photo of that location or not and let me go ahead and click on this picture and you get the chance to see an actual picture which was taken from this location all right let me go ahead and turn off that layer and if i zoom out just a bit and now if i were to click on this rods check box you can see that the entire rod network gets appeared over here and that can be quite helpful in certain cases to see a very detailed representation of the of the rod network along with the corresponding codes as well so let me go ahead and turn off that and as we already discussed if i were to zoom into a particular city and if i wanted to have a look at the buildings in a realistic way it's just like this you can always keep these 3d buildings checked and if you were to uncheck you can see that the 3d features actually disappear all right finally i'm going to also discuss about this terrain feature that you can see over here now to do that let me go ahead and move into a different part of the city we can have a look at some mountainous regions now over here from the map itself you're able to see that this looks like a range of mountains and if i were to zoom in and even if i tilt my wave you can see that still the mountains actually appear to be rather flat there has been no attribution of any 3d information into those mountains as long as you keep this terrain option checked off but if you happen to check this one you can see that immediately the 3d properties of the terrain gets activated now if i were to zoom out you can see how different it actually looks if i were to activate these 3d properties when it comes to the terrain and now you can clearly see that it's it's a range of mountains just like this and you can even zoom in and you can have a very clear view of how the valleys are formed and how those mountain tops look in a very realistic way so that's a pretty cool feature isn't it and again it's quite normal that when you have this terrain feature turned on it might take a while for the components to load and it can depend on the speed of your computer as well as the speed of your internet connection but of course after a while you'll be able to enjoy these very realistic sceneries all right now that we have covered the important parts of this layers panel or the important components of this layers panel now let's have a look at the coordinate and altitude information all right if you happen to look at the lower right corner of your screen you can see a bunch of numbers which happens to change whenever you move your mouse cursor now right now i'm moving my mosques and you can see that the numbers actually keep on changing rapidly well the first two numbers that you see over here are x and y coordinates and by the looks of it i think you can identify that it shows the coordinates in the form of degrees minutes and seconds and when you move your mouse cursor you can see that the coordinates do change accordingly isn't it so if you happen to come across a case where you need to give the exact coordinates of a location to someone you don't really need to use any sophisticated gis tools or softwares instead you can just open up google earth navigate to the place where you want and you can simply set your mouse cursor on top of that for example if i wanted to get the coordinates of a different city let's say sheffield or not just the city itself maybe a specific component of of the city all right there's something which looks a bit interesting over here i'm not so i'm not really sure what this right over here is but let's say i wanted to give the coordinates of this particular location to someone all i have to do is simply place my mouse point over here and now you can see that the corresponding coordinates of this particular location is displayed on the lower right side of my screen in degrees minutes and seconds just like this well if you want to be a bit more precise you can even use this add placemark tool and after that you can move this icon right over here and when you do that you can see that the numbers change over here you can have a look at it again you can see that when i move the place mark the numbers change accordingly so i'm just going to fix this at the location of my interest and now you don't really have to even bother about typing these numbers by yourself you can simply copy this latitude and longitude information in the form of degrees minutes and seconds which is extremely convenient isn't it we're going to discuss about this add placemak tool in detail in the next video but at this level for this beginner's tutorial i just wanted to point out to you guys that you can very simply and conveniently copy the coordinates of a location of your choice using this manner all right i'm just going to go ahead and close this for the time being all right just now i mentioned that the coordinates are right now in degrees and minutes and seconds but what if you want to weave the coordinates in a different format let's say in decimal degrees well if you go to tools and go to options you can see that the latitude long and longitude information are currently shown in degrees minutes and seconds and when using google earth pro you have one two three four five ways of showing your coordinates as you see right over here and you can select your preferred style accordingly now for example if i wanted to switch to decimal degrees all i have to do is select this and click apply and now you can see over here the latitude and the longitude coordinates changed accordingly into decimal degrees when i move the mouse cursor you can observe that it's not in the previous format anymore because now it's in decimal degrees all right now let's move on to the next piece of information that you can see on the lower right corner of your screen after the coordinates you can see that right over here it says elevation and this basically shows the elevation at the point where you have kept your mouse pointed when i change mouse pointer it changes accordingly as well and now let me go let me zoom out and maybe go to some area with a bit of high elevation let's say for example over here and now if i put my mouse point over here you can see that the elevation is about 550 over here whereas if i were to put my mouse pointer somewhere over here in this city you can see that the elevation is only about 203 now something to keep in mind is that these elevation values actually only accurate up to a certain degree and definitely it's nowhere near as accurate as if you were to use a very precise uh dm like lidar dm of course so that's something to keep in mind and the final information that you see over here is basically called the altitude of the eye now what exactly is meant by the eye well if you were to imagine yourself floating on the air and if this was your weave this number shows how further you are basically your altitude let's say if you happen to tilt your weave just like this and this would be kind of equivalent to you sort of getting closer to the ground isn't it and as you can see over here the altitude of your eye reduces accordingly i guess these different information that you can see over here on the right lower right corner of the screen are clear to you guys now and now we'll see how we can obtain some information like the lens along a particular stretch and also how to get the information corresponding to different areas now let's say you wanted to calculate the distance from [Music] this point up to this point you can simply head over to this show ruler tool and from here if you select this line option and if you select the units that you would like to get your distances let's say in this case i would like to get my distances in kilometers all you have to do is select your starting point and after that draw a straight line all the way up to your point b and this will show you how far it is from this point to this point as you can see over here it's about kilometers and similarly let's say if i wanted to get the distance from this city until this city you can see that it's about 26.04 kilometers all right so i will clear this out but let's say for example if i wanted to get something a bit different let's say i wanted to get the distance or the length of a stretch of a rod which is not necessarily a straight line it can have curves okay for example let's say i wanted to get the distance from this corner all the way up to this corner along this rod that you can see over here now how do how do we get lengths like that well to do that you have to switch to this path tab right over here which basically lets you draw a polyline instead of just a straight line and you can calculate the length along that polyline from from the starting point all the way up to the ending point now for example if i wanted to pinpoint this location as my starting point i can basically draw the line along the road stretch as you can see over here and this is definitely taking into account these different curvy parts of the of the rod as well just like this to clearly mark out your rod all right let's say that this was my stopping point and now you can see that for this particular stretch i have a length or i have a calculated distance of 1.1 kilometers basically about 1100 meters so that's how you can utilize this path tool in order to calculate distances which are not necessarily straight lines all right i'm going to clear this one out now over here you can see there's another part called polygons now you can use this polygon option to actually calculate different areas for example if you wanted to calculate the area of this particular lan plot all you have to do is simply click on this polygon option and over here specify in which unit you would like to have your area information now by default you can see that it's square meters but let's say i would like to have my area information in hectares while having the perimeter now pyramid is automatically calculated when you want to calculate the area so let's say i would like to calculate my perimeter in meters and all you have to do is specify or digitize the boundaries of the lan plot just like this so that understands the geographical extent that you would like to cover from your polygon by taking into account the curves as well and once you're done you can see that it's already it has already calculated the area in this case it's about 7.8 hectares and the perimeter accounts to about 1298.5 meters so these kinds of calculations can very easily be done using this ruler tool of of google earth pro and i hope that that information was quite useful for you guys and now we are going to move on to the next part and that's how to revisit the past let me go ahead and close this one out and i'll zoom this one out as well and let me go ahead and zoom into london just a little bit alright now what do i mean by revisiting the past well if you're using google earth and as long as you're in the right location believe it or not you can do a bit of time traveling but not to the future but to the past thanks to this tool that you can see right over here which is show historical imagery now if you click on this you will be able to see this kind of a slider now i'm making this tutorial in january 2021 and as you can see by the specification over here over here in this slider we have some some vertical splits and those different vertical splits actually correspond to the time periods where different images or different imagery is available for this particular location now for example if i were to slide this one down over here you can see that different timelines or different time stamps appear and if i were to let's say stop my slider at this particular image that you can see over here this is a picture or this is an aerial image from year 1999 september and let's see if i were to zoom in a bit more like this and if i were to quickly change this back you can see what kind of changes has taken place over the past few decades isn't it and similarly you can see that we have we have one image from 1945 december 1945 and of course the image is not that clear but somehow you can utilize these kind of images to actually check what sort of features have changed over the years if i were to slide this back yeah you can see that what sort of uh changes have taken place over the past few past few decades in this case all right now let's move on to the next feature of google earth pro and that's of course the searching capabilities of google earth now just like if you were to use google for searching places you can actually use google earth to search for locations too and that does not necessarily need to be locations by the name of the town or the city it can even be the name of let's say a particular company you can simply search and go to location of your preference for example if i say barcelona spain and if i search you can see that google earth is actually automatically flying me into barcelona of spain just like this and you can always zoom in to get a very clear view of the city and of course you can go ahead and activate the 3d buildings in this case which will give you a very nice view of the city of barcelona in this manner and as long as you keep on this terrain option checked you will see the mountains popping out just like this as well and you can always turn it off and see how the changes take place of course i would like to keep that turned on so that my image looks or my my weave looks much more realistic rather than having a kind of a flat image pretty cool isn't it and not only that you can get directions just like if you were to use google just to get directions if i would like to travel from barcelona to [Music] madrid i can simply hit get directions and and that will sort of automatically take me into this kind of a top weave so that i can very clearly get an idea where i'm going to travel to and of course the associated distances and the approximate time it would take for me to reach my destination if i were to use these different types of transpondation modes so that's quite interesting having all of these information and having all of these capabilities just at one place so that you don't have to use multiple applications to do different things you can get all of these done just in one place and that's google earth pro itself all right now i'm going to talk about the street weave which is also another very interesting feature which is being served through google it so let's say if i were to zoom out like this you can see that over here we have only three tools which we already discussed and if i were to zoom into some city area over here you can see that after a while this icon appears because now google earth is indicating to us that we have the capability of using the street wave which was not possible if we were to let's say zoom out quite a far distance from our area of interest i'm going to go ahead and zoom in just a little bit more let's say just like this and you can see that there's a big roundabout over here and what if i wanted to have a very realistic experience where i get to wander around anywhere i want just as if i were to actually walk around the city right at this moment and you can and you can do that simply by using this street view so what i recommend is first you can click on this button and you can you can drag this icon somewhere over here and as long as you hold your mouse button you can see some indications of different streets in blue color now google street is not available for each and every rod of each and every city and where exactly it's available is being highlighted right now from these blue color lines so if you were to place this icon on top of this blue color line that will take you right into the corresponding street weave just like this and this is an actual 360 degree beef of the barcelona city and the cool thing is that you can actually move your mouse to navigate around just like this and not only that you can simply double click to move forward just like this so this is quite equivalent to you actually walking around the city of barcelona in a very realistic way pretty cool isn't it and of course you can double click to move around and similarly you can use the up down left right arrow keys of your keyboard as well let's see if i want to go forward i can use the up key and should i need to give some time for the for the images to load every time when i need to move forward and let's see if i wanted to move backwards i can do that as well just like this and of course i if i want to rotate the weave i can use the left and the right mouse buttons and have a very clear 360 degree weave of the city just in this manner quite interesting isn't it but let's see if you want to quickly navigate to different place so rather than traveling through the road you can simply exit the street view for the time being just like this let's see for the time being i'm going to turn off this uh terrain option and let's say that if i wanted to go to a different place maybe let's say somewhere over here all i have to do is first navigate to the location that you would like to go into and after that you can drag this icon and check whether any google street view is available for that or not and after that you can simply see that these different roads get highlighted in this blue color line which means google street view is available for that so that i can simply move this icon to that location and that will take me right into the google street wave just like this and i can move along this riverbank to have something like an actual experience of me walking along this road at any given time that i want all right i think we covered quite a lot of things in this beginners tutorial now to wrap up this introductory tutorial i'm going to show you how to save a high quality snap of an image of google earth and let's say save it as a jpeg now to do that i'm going to first exit this tree straight wave and i'll first maybe try to reposition all right let's say that i would like to take a snap of this beautiful lake in geneva all right just like this and let me go ahead and turn off this historical imagery tool to save an hd quality snap of this weave right over here all you have to do is first you can actually hide the sidebar simply by using this so that you get more coverage just like this and after that you can simply go to file and you can go to save and save image and whenever you click on save image you will see a couple of options up here so i'm going to take you through these different options now you can see that under this map options you have the possibility of adding a title and a description over here if you wish to but if you don't wish to add anything you can simply untick this similarly you can untick the legend the scale if you don't want to have that or maybe in this case let me just keep the scale which is appeared right over here as you can see and the compass maybe i'll retain the compass as well and after that in the next option you can set the resolution you have the possibility of saving this image in a maximum resolution of 4800 by 2460 but let's say for my purpose i would like to save this in 4k ultra hd resolution finally in order to save the image all you have to do is just click on this button save image and after that i can give a file name i'm just going to name this one as like geneva and after that i can simply go ahead and save the image and it and it might take a couple of seconds as you can see over here because it's saving this in an ultra hd format and now if i navigate back to the place where i saved the image into you can see that it's right over here like geneva i can double click simply on that to open the image and now you can see that even if i zoom into certain areas the quality of the image is still actually retained because this is now in ultra hd 4k resolution so i guess that's about it for this tutorial guys i think we covered quite a lot of things for a beginners tutorial but i hope that the information was not too overwhelming for you guys and these are the key things that we believe that you need to know in order to get started with google earth to be able to comfortably dive into the advanced functionalities of google earth which we will definitely be discussing in the next tutorial so if you do have any questions guys don't hesitate to comment them down below and we'll get back to you as soon as we can and don't forget to check out our next tutorial we'll be discussing more advanced functionalities of google earth which can make your life easier and which can elevate your productivity to the next level when using google earth so thanks a lot for watching guys i'll see you in the next one

Channel: GeoDelta Labs

Views: 88,625

Rating: 4.9126782 out of 5

Keywords: Google earth tutorial, Google earth live, Google earth pro tutorial, How to use google earth, How to use google earth pro, Google earth pro project, Google earth pro map making tutorial, Google earth pro download, Google earth pro to arcgis, Google earth download, Street view, Google earth street view, Google earth pro street view, Elevation profile, Google earth elevation profile, Google earth ruler, Google earth contours, Google earth to autocad, Google street view

Id: 3lGl1VZjtg4

Length: 37min 0sec (2220 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021