Haven’t we all had to look at hundreds of someone’s holiday photo’s before where you just wish they had slimmed down the selection, done some creative layout or simply just done something cool with them? With all the free tools that are out there on the web there really is no excuse these days not to have some fun holiday photo’s and or video. In 2005 my wife and I and our two little children visited South Africa/Mozambique for business/pleasure. We took lots of pictures, videos and I also recorded some tracks using my Garmin iQue 3600 gadget.

As I had a quiet evening ahead of me I decided I wanted to export my tracks to kmz format for overlay in Google Earth and/or Google Maps. With this file I wanted to add placemarks including links to video highlights. Is that too much to ask for one evening? Not really…

First of all I downloaded my tracks from the GPS through my USB cable using the wonderful Garmin MapSource program. After having selected the tracks I wanted to include I exported them as a gpx file, the open GPS eXchange Format.

Newer versions of Google Earth support direct loading of gpx files but they did not work well in my case. So I used the free GPS Visualizer tool which does a wonderful job of turning my gpx file into a kmz file including nice colouring of the different track content.

All that remained was adding the placemarks in Google Earth which we visited. For some I embedded the YouTube code to the Placemark Description folder as neatly outlined in the Google Earth Outreach tutorial. Had to upgrade to Google Earth 4.2.0198.2451 (beta) before my videos showed up. And voila! Mission accomplished!

Okay, I did already have raw video material sitting around but exporting small videos in mpeg format and uploading them was remarkably easy. Within a few minutes they were directly linkable too (though not immediately indexed yet of course).

Not bad for an evening home, another thing to tick off my hobby to do list. All I have to do now is add some more video/photo content

Download result Google Earth file

If you are using Internet Explorer you might have to change the extension of the Google Earth file from .zip to .kmz to be able to open it directly in Google Earth. Still have to make some changes to my server so that IE users don’t have to go through this hassle. Alternatively you can download Firefox web browser.