How I Make My Hike Summaries in Google Earth/Maps

Yesterday, I duplicated my work in Google Earth and put together some pictures from my last trip to Griffith Park. Today, I was listening to Podcacher talk about geocoding photos, and I thought I'd detail the steps I take to put together the KMZ files for my hikes. I think a few readers might be interested, but mostly, I intend to post it on the Podcacher forums. As a result, cut tag!

( How to Create a Fancy Google Map of Your Hike with Photos and Other Neat Stuff. )

And that's it. There's still a bit more for me to learn. Sometimes I think I should enforce the ordering of waypoints by numbering them (Google Maps always defaults to alphabetical order, it seems), but I think I'd rather work to make suer that I can tell my story geographically instead of chronologically. I'm still learning how to properly break up the tale of my journey into the various textual locations (Google Earth descriptions, Picasa captions, and Geocaching logs). Soon I'll play around with embedding links to YouTube videos, so that I can include my video from Ladyface (and future others like it). But that's pretty much the method I use right now. Hopefully this information was of some interest to you. Let me know if anything is unclear.

If you decided to skip all the technical stuff, here's the Google Map of my most recent trip to Griffith Park. And here's my Picasa gallery for the same trip: