Google Earth Pro Advanced Tutorial (Part 1)

hello guys welcome to this advanced google earth pro tutorial in this tutorial we'll be discussing some advanced functionalities of google earth pro which can make your life easy and also can help to elevate your productivity now before we dive in if you would like to quickly grasp a good solid understanding of google earth pro at a beginner's level i encourage you guys to check out the following tutorial where i explain to you guys some of the most important things that you need to know as a beginner when using google earth pro and if you've been using google earth pro for quite some time and if you would like to find out what more you can do with google earth pro desktop application then you guys can stick around to find out what exactly we have to offer through this tutorial alright so without further ado let's go ahead and get started with the tutorial by opening the google earth pro application and i'm going to zoom into my preferred area of interest that's going to be the city of london and i'm going to get started this tutorial by discussing some of the most important tools that you see over here in this top toolbar so first i'll explain to you guys what we can do with this first tool that you see over here which is this add placemark tool now as you can see over here this tool is pretty straightforward and you can use this tool to pretty much mark anything that's interesting to you on your map and while you're doing your edits with the placemark always keep in mind that you need to keep this window open because you cannot do any edits to your placemark if you happen to close this window by any chance for example let's say if you click ok you can see that this placemark gets sort of stationed at the place where we left it so in case if that happens to you uh you have actually nothing to worry about much you can go over here to places and right click on your untitled placemark and after that you can go to properties and that'll sort of change the property of this placemark to be in the editable mod again so let's say i would like to specify some of the key places with importance uh for a hypothetical case i'm going to mark out a couple of things so i'm going to start by saying that this is the waterloo bridge so i'm going to enter the name right over here and you can see over here by default it specifies the corresponding latitude and longitude information as well and of course you can do go ahead and do changes which relates to the appearance of this particular place mark if you wish to for example if you would like to change the style and the color of the label you can go over here and let me go ahead and maybe change the label color to be light blue like this yeah and you can see that it changed accordingly and you can change the color of the icon as well for this case let's say that i'm going to go with green and you can see that the changes took place over here and of course you can change the scale if you would like to make the font size a bit bigger you can increase the scale just like this i'm going to actually keep it at about 0.8 and of course you can change the size of the icon as well just like this and let me go ahead and return return this to be about 0.9 i'll fix this at 1. after you're satisfied with all the changes you can simply hit ok and now you can see that the mark got appeared over here on top of the waterloo bridge and you don't have any limitations when it comes to adding these place marks you can add as many as you want so let's say if i would like to specify the westminister bridge as well which is this one right over here i can again open up this and i can move this place mark right over here and i'll rename this to be westminster bridge and just to create some contrast i'm going to add a different icon for westminster bridge and if you would like to make any changes to the icon you can of course use this particular button over here and that will open up this box from where you can select different types of icons which you can use in order to highlight your your item of interest so just for the sake of this tutorial let's say that i'm going to go with this particular icon and i can click ok and similar to what we did previously we can open up the style and color and of course we can change the font color let me go ahead and assign yellow to be the font color and the color of the icon maybe i'll change that to be a bit of a dark blue in this case and after you're done with everything you can go ahead and click ok and now you can see that we have two place marks specified over here so even if you happen to end up in a zoom out weave like this you can always directly double click on the corresponding place mark from here and it'll zoom you right into that just like this pretty cool isn't it all right now i'm going to move into the second tool which is this add polygon tool i think you realize that using this add place mark tool you cannot specify any areas you only can do a specification of a of a particular point in this case you can see that it's more or less pointing towards this particular part of the bridge and similarly in the west minister bridge this place mark is basically pointing to this particular location on top of the bridge but what if you wanted to specify a particular area on your map and that's where this add polygon tool comes in handy so for example if i wanted to mark out a particular lan plot let's say for some reason if i wanted to draw a polygon to mark out the boundary of this saint james spark including the lake i can go ahead and click on this add polygon tool first and while having this window open i can start digitizing this like just like this so i'm going to digitize the boundary by adding points and this way i can take care of these curves as well and you can conveniently zoom in and out to make your digitizing a bit more efficient and now you can see that i'm running into a problem because since there's a fill color for this polygon i'm actually starting to have troubles in properly seeing what i'm digitizing so if that's the case you can simply head over to the style and color and over here you can specify that i don't really need a filled and outline color i only need just this outline and of course you can go ahead and change the color of that outline as well for this i'm going to select yellow color and i'm going to increase the thickness as well so that what i'm digitizing is more visible for me and now you can see that it's it's much more easier to digitize the different components and i'm going to zoom this one out and i'm going to point my mouse pointer just like this just to cover the area to which i would like to zoom into and after that i will continue with my digitization just like this and after that i'll zoom out again and i will zoom into the parts which were not really visible before by the way i'm not going to accurately do the digitizing because this is just for the purpose of demonstrating to you guys how we can use this add polygon tool and once you're comfortable with whatever you have done you can simply go ahead and click ok in order to specify the polygon and now well i think i forgot to add the name so in case after you're done with everything if you happen to forget something you can always switch this back into an editable mod simply by right clicking over here and by going to properties of course what i forgot to do is to specify the name i'm going to specify this to be sen jamespark and click ok and now you can see that we have two place marks and one polygon over here just like this and it's normally if you happen to wonder what could be a potential usage of digitizing things like this using google earth pro well one of the direct advantages of doing this is that you can transfer this information into gis softwares like qgis so while working with your geospatial data if you happen to come across case where you want to quickly digitize certain elements and if you want to transfer them into your gis software you can quite easily do that using google earth pro and as you saw over here we can use this add polygon tool to do those kind of digitizations and later i'm going to show you how we can transfer these information into gis software like qgis all right so the third tool that i'm going to discuss today is this add path tool and so far we talked about adding placemarks which is quite relevant for specifying fine points and we talked about at polygon tool which is quite useful for specifying a spatial areas as you might be able to guess this add path tool is basically used to specify line segments to let's say mark out a specific path in terms of multiple line segments and a good example that i can think of is if you wanted to mark out things like roads rivers which can be marked out using line segments we can go ahead and open up this tool first and after that i'm going to mark out this part of the road let's say all the way up to this roundabout and i'm going to name this one as road 1 and similarly you can go ahead and change the colors according to your preference and it'll appear right over here and i'll just go ahead and add one more path to specify this road right over here well there's no specific reason why i'm digitizing this road but this is just for the sake of this tutorial and yeah my ending point is somewhere over here and i'm going to add different color for this let's say i'll select red and increase the thickness just a bit and after that i'm going to name this one as road 2. click ok all right that's pretty much it and now i'm going to explain to you guys what we can do with this fourth tool which is this add image overlay tool so similar to what we did over here you can see that that also opens up this new image overlay dialog box and from here we can bring an external image into our working space in google earth pro and the way to do that would be simply by using this browse button now for this you have to make sure that you already have access to a separate image so what i'll do is i'll click on this browse button and navigate to the place where i have kept my image and as you can see over here i have an image of the send jam spark so that's what i'm going to bring into my working space of google ed pro and i'll select that and click open and now you can see that it's going to make things a bit messy but that's all right all you have to do is zoom out just a little bit and from here you can see these different handles from which we can control the size of the image so first what i'm going to do is i'm going to resize the image just a little bit like this and let's say i'm going to place it somewhere over here right next to the saint james park and i can rename this to be send james park and if you go over here to this location tab you can make further changes to things like the rotation now for example if i specify the rotation in degrees let's say if i change this to be about 15 degrees you can see that it rotates accordingly but i would like to set this at 0 degrees and after that i can go ahead and click ok so you will see that this picture will be placed on top of my working space as a separate attribute just like these other items that you can see over here all right now i'm going to discuss the fifth tool that we can see over here that is record a tour and this is a pretty straightforward tool as well now to demonstrate to you guys what we can do with this tool i'm first going to get rid of this saint james park and this road 1 and road 2 just to have some clarity on the picture and what this tool pretty much can do is it lets you create a dynamic scene of certain movements that you would like to do in google earth and you can actually use this footage for certain different purposes let's say to quickly show someone let's say the points that you would like to visit when you are in this city things like that let's see if i want to record a tour of a dynamic scene where i zoom in to these different bridges what i can do is i can first go ahead and click on this button and after that you can see that on the bottom you get this this kind of a record button well next to that you can also see a microphone button so that gives the indication that while recording the tour if you wish to narrate something you can do that as well and your voice will also get recorded along with the dynamic movements that you can do using google earth pro now for this tutorial i'm not going to narrate anything i'm just going to demonstrate to you guys how you can just record this tour so first i will click on this red color button in order to activate the recording and after that let's say i would like to double click this bridge right over here in order to zoom in first to that bridge and after that i will zoom out using this negative sign over here and after that i will double click on the next bridge so that my camera sort of zooms into that particular bridge and i'm going to zoom out again and next i'm going to double click on this bridge and i will zoom out again and then we go to this bridge zoom out this bridge and after the zoom out and i'll double click on this bridge as my final point for recording my tour and after that i'm going to end the tour just from here and you can simply click on this button to stop recording and you can go ahead and click on this play button and it will actually play that particular recording or that particular movements that you did in the form of a recording just like what you can see right now on the screen [Music] so [Music] so all right that was the end of the tour and of course not to lose this you have to go ahead and save this so i'm going to click on the save button and we have to specify a name i'm going to say two bridges something like that and it'll be right over here along with your other components that you can see you can temporarily deactivate that and in case if you would like to have a look at the tour again you can always check that and double click on that and that will start your animation just like this so i'm going to stop this one for the time being that's about it for this record tour tool and now i'm going to move into this tool that you can see over here which is one of the tools which lets you see historical images this tool right over here and with this tool you can revisit the past images of a certain area and see how those places looked in the past but of course you have to keep in mind that this capability comes with certain limitations and these vertical marks that you see over here in this timeline are actually the times in the history for which those past information is actually available and also the availability of these historical images can also be limited depending on on the geographical location now for example if i wanted to zoom into a different place let's say if i zoom into cardiff over here and if i wanted to see how cardiff looked way back in 1945 i can drag this slider until it hits this point and somehow you can see that we don't really have the coverage of this particular area in 1945 but of course we can get some sort of an idea how things looked back then in 1945 right around here and the next available time period for which a picture is available is in 2001 and you can see that how things may have changed over the decades when going from 1945 up to 2001 and if you drag this slider to 2013 you can see how the changes have actually taken place and if i drag this all the way up to 2020 this is how the area looks in the present actually this imagery is from may of 2020 so it's not way back just a couple of months ago so this is how this area looks at present times so similarly just to check the capability of this uh of this tool let me go ahead and zoom into another country let's see if i wanted to see how paris looked back then so i'm going to zoom into paris just like this and let's see how 1949 looks yeah you can see that the image itself might not be that clear it's easy to see a couple of distorted areas over here and if i pull this slider all the way up to 2004 you can sort of get a sense of how the city has been changed and if i slide this back to 2019 the most recent image that we have is of 2019 in the month of august you can do all sorts of analysis if you actually look through the details carefully by using this show historical images tool which can be quite helpful in in certain cases especially when you're doing things like uh analyzing the changes in the land use and land cover over the past few years and when you're doing stuff like that this tool can definitely be of immense help without a doubt so i'm going to double click over here on this send james park polygon just to move back to where i was supposed to be and i'm going to adjust my wave and the final tool that i'm going to discuss with you guys today is the show ruler tool now you can use this ruler tool to simply measure things like direct distances lengths along a specific path areas perimeters things like that so to get started i'm going to click on this and as you can see it opens up this dialog box in which you get a couple of tabs like this so i will start with this line tab and this line tab can be used to measure a direct distance from let's say point a until point b if you would like to know what is the length you can simply use this line tool you cannot use this line tool for measuring distances which has curves which needs to be specified not by a direct line but by a polyline and that can be done using this path tool but we'll come to that now let's say i would like to know the distance of this waterloo bridge over the river themes now you can see that the bridge extends even just a bit beyond the edge of the river bank but if i wanted to know exactly the distance let's say from this point up to this point just where it crosses the riverbank i can specify my starting point over here and i can specify my ending point somewhere over here and now if you check out over here you can see that the length is 298.62 meters of course you can change the units if you wish to let's see if i wanted to know the distance in miles it's going to be 0.91 miles but i would like to have this in meters and once you're done you can simply hit clear in order to clear the thing and similarly let's say if i wanted to know the length of this roof all i have to do is just select the starting point and drag this all the way until the end like this and it's going to tell you that it's 49.28 meters long all right now let's move into something a bit tricky now let's say if you wanted to measure some distances along a specific road which is not necessarily going to be a straight line you might have to take a couple of turns here and there so you can do that simply by using this path tool just specify the the unit in which you're going to want to work in my case i'm going to work with meters and let's say if i want to know the distance starting from this point all the way up to let's say this point if i were to walk along the pavements of these roads so all you have to do is specify your starting point and you have to mark out the corresponding path just like this and let's say i'm going to turn from here and i'm going to reach my destination that's going to be this corner and once you're done you can see that the total distance that you have to walk along this path is going to be 335.51 meters so i guess it's clear for you guys the difference between this line tool and the path tool the path to lets you measure distances along the entire path which is made out of different polyline segments as you can see over here now if you select this polygon tab what you see over here is that it lets you measure the distance or an area of a geometric shape on the ground to demonstrate this to you guys i'm going to use this saint james park and let's say for example i would like to get an idea about the total area of the sun jam spark which is basically what's been covered by this this polygon which i marked out earlier so now all i have to do is just select this polygon tab and after that set the the units in which you would like to have your area and perimeter information and i would like to have my area in hectares and the perimeter in meters and i will start marking out the coverage just like this and of course in your case you can be a bit more precise when marking out the boundary but for me i'm just going to uh go through it a bit fast because i'm doing this just to demonstrate to you guys the capabilities of google earth pro and you can see that i more or less covered the the entire spark and once i'm done you can come over here and you can see that the area is about 25.3 hectares and the total perimeter is about 2129 meters so if you were to do your evening jogs around the saint james park when you complete one round you would have more or less covered about 2.1 kilometers and that's quite a serious length if you're just jogging and this is basically the area which has been taken up by this ngm spark all right so those are some of the tools which i consider to be quite important especially when you're using google earth pro at a bit of an advanced level so i'm going to move on to the next thing that i'm going to talk about in this tutorial and that's how to get the elevation profile using google earth so for that i'm going to zoom out just a little bit like this and i would like to navigate to somewhere over here in which you can get these kind of mountainous regions if you draw your attention to the lower right corner of the screen you can see that even if i move my mouse pointer the elevation value is zero right now because i have not activated this terrain properties using this checkbox so first what i'm going to do is i'm going to activate this terrain option and now you can see that when i move my mouse pointer it gives me the corresponding elevation value but now what i'm going to discuss is not really the way to get the elevation at different points but to get the elevation as a profile across a given line stretch now to do that first you need to create a line stretch for which you would like to obtain the elevation profile you can do that simply by using this add path tool so what i'm going to do is i'm going to let's say create a path like this and let's assume that i would like to obtain the elevation profile across this path so i'm going to rename this one to be let's say elevation profile and once you have created that you can right click over here and you can select show elevation profile and as soon as you do that if you happen to move your mouse point over here in this graph you can see that simultaneously a red color arrow moves across the line stretch that we just drew using the add path tool so what you see over here in this graph if you look at the y-axis it's the elevation and if you look at the x-axis you can see that that's the distance if you consider this starting point to be zero you can see that this is the horizontal distance across that line stretch and you can see how the elevation varies so the highest appears to be somewhere over here which is about 728 and you can see how the elevation varies across that line stretch and this information can be extremely useful in certain cases and it's a comfort that we are able to do this within google earth pro itself however one thing to keep in mind is that these elevation values are accurate only to a certain degree so you cannot expect to have a very high degree of accuracy but for general purposes this is actually quite good enough just for us to get a basic understanding of how the elevation varies over a specified line stretch like this [Music] you

Channel: GeoDelta Labs

Views: 35,260

Rating: 4.9230771 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 to arcgis, Google earth download, 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, Google earth advanced tutorial, qgis

Id: r9G99E4kDJQ

Length: 28min 25sec (1705 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021