How I Make My Hike Summaries in Google Earth/Maps

[tablesaw]

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!

Step One: Hiking.

• First I have to go do something that merits cartography. Usually this is hiking, although occasionally it's a vacation. I make sure that I take my GPSr (a Magellan Explorist) and my digital camera (a Kodak Easyshare C360).
• When I finish my drive, I start a new track log. This will ultimately create the "path" that shows up on the map.
• Whenever I want to take a picture, I also record a waypoint on my GPSr. I let the GPSr use its own autonumbering for waypoints (usually POI00001, POI00002, POI00003, etc.).
• Whenever I want to take any other sort of waypoint, like for trailheads, parking spaces, and other points of interest, I make sure to rename the waypoint before saving (P for parking, TH for trailhead, BM for benchmark, etc.).
• When I return to the car, I save the track log. If I plan to do more hiking, I'll sometimes start a new track log to record my drive to the next location.

Step Two: Uploading and Set-Up.

• I use three different programs to create my map.
  • Google Earth Plus. I use Google Earth to handle my GPS files and to put everythign together. I pay the yearly subscription of twenty dollars so that I can convert my GPS files directly into Google Earth.
  • Picasa. Picasa handles my photographs. I use it to download photos from my camera, geotag them, touch them up, and upload them to the web.
  • Geocaching Swiss Army Knife. I mostly use this program to create geocaching files that I can read on my GPSr. But I also use it to import caches into Google Earth.
  I boot up all three programs to get things started.
• Next, I connect my GPSr to my computer. This used to be a matter of connecting via cables, but because the cable is frotzed, I have to remove the SD card in the GPSr and insert it into my card reader.
• I copy the files off of the GPSr (or the SD card) and save them into a folder on my hard drive. (It's possible to read directly from the GPSr/card, but I prefer to do it this way.)
• Then, I connect the camera to the computer, and let Picasa download all of the pictures onto my hard drive.
• With all of the data on my computer, I'm ready to begin.
• I go into My Places on Google Earth, and I create a new folder describing my hike, and I create subfolders: Routes, Geocaches, and Photos. (I don't create one for Waypoints yet, but I will later).

Step Three: Routes (Track Logs).

• The easiest thing to deal with is track logs, it's also the most important, so I do it first.
• Using the GPS interface on Google Earth Plus, I open up one of the track logs on my hard drive.
• Google Earth loads the track in the light-blue color I usually retain for my maps.
• Usually, that's pretty much all I have to do. I rename the path and describe it a little bit, and move it to the Routes subfolder.
• If the track log describes something other than walking (usually driving) I change the color of the track. That way, it doesn't look like I walked miles and miles and miles.
• Sometimes, I have to modify the track log a bit. For example,
  • Sometimes I don't rememebr to start or stop the track log at the correct place, so my log has a bunch of stuff I don't want.
  • Sometimes my GPS reception goes wacky and my log starts recording locations that I never went to.
• In those cases, I go into properties and modify the path directly. I select points that shouldn't be there and delete them. I try not to add points if I can help it, but sometimes it's necessary.

Step Four: Waypoints.

• Waypoints are pretty simple too. First I load the waypoint file using the GPS window in Google Earth Plus.
• Now, I see my route peppered with waypoints. Most of them are places where I took photos (e.g., POI00001), but a few are important. I'll ignore the photo waypoints until step four.
• First, I move the folder containing all the waypoints into my hike folder. This way, I end up with a Waypoints subfolder and I don't have to transfer every waypoint individually.
• Now, I go through each non-photo waypoint and elaborate on it. I rename it, I add a bit of a description about what happened there and why I thought it was important, and I choose a new icon for it.
• Sometimes, I decide to add waypoints that I didn't mark while I was hiking, either because I forgot or because I didn't actually go to the location.
  • If I need to, I can place a waypoint directly in Google Earth. Usually, I zoom in really close and try to eyeball the location as best I can.
  • I can also save waypoints from a Google Earth layer. For example, I didn't get a waypoint for the snack bar The Trails. So I turned on the "Dining" layer, which provided me with a location for the place. I saved that waypoint into my places, then modified the properties so that it kept the photo, but dropped the Zagat Review.
  • Finally, I can find a location by typing a location's address into Google Earth, which finds the place pretty well.
• And that's the end of waypoints.

Step Five: Geocaches.

• First of all, I go to Geocaching.com and write logs for all of the caches I looked for. (I usually do this right after I go hiking, so this step gets done long before I start putting the map together.)
• Then I go into GSAK and select the caches that I visited, whether I found them or not.
• I use the User Flag filter to get a list of just those caches, and I export them in GPX format. I save the file into the same hard-drive folder as the track logs and the waypoints.
• I open the GPX file in Google Earth, and move the cahces into the Geocaching subfolder.
• I rename all of the caches from their waypoint names (a series of letters and numbers) to their descriptive names. (Now that I think about it, I can probably get GSAK to do this step for me. I'll have to look into that.)
• Finally, I copy the logs from the cache pages into the properties of each cache, under the description. I include a link to the log's page on each one.

Step Six: Photos.

• Here's where things get a bit complicated. The hack that I have for getting the photos where I want them is complicated enough that this step has substeps.
• My first task is to geotag the photos.
  • Picasa has a feature that lets me geotag my photos using Google Earth. So I select the first few photos I can remember and then choose that option from the Tools menu bar.
  • Picasa dumps me into Google Earth, where I can see all of the paths, waypoints, and geocaches.
  • I geotag my photos chronologically, starting from waypoint POI00001 for the first few pics, then moving to POI0002 when appropriate.
  • Picasa superimposes a little crosshair over the center of the Google Earth map. Instead of trying to position it myself, I just double-click on the appropriate waypoint and let Google Earth center things on its own.
  • If I have a hard time figuring out which pictures go where, I look at the tie stamp on the pictures. There's usually a significant gap (a few minutes at least) between the timestamps of photos taken from different locations.
  • I geotag all of the pictures I took, even if they're crappy and I'm probably going to delete them later. That's because if I delete them first, I don't know which waypoints to skip.
• With the geotagging done, I start choosing the photos I want to upload to the web.
  • I go through photos looking for ones that don't suck as much as the others.
  • When I find them, I usually do some basic touch-ups using the Picasa tools. This usually involves making the picture warmer and playing with shadows and highlights.
  • When I've decided on a photo, I add a caption. This is usually the way that I remember which pics I want to upload. If it has a caption, it's going onto the web.
• Next, I upload the photos to my Picasa account.
  • I go through and add all of the captioned pictures to my photo tray.
  • When I'm sure I've got all of them, I upload to my account using the Picasa software. Pretty much all of his is automated.
  • When the upload is finished, I go to the webpage and do some final manuevering to make sure everything looks right. I correct the order of the photos if necessary, and I usually choose a new album cover.
• Now, strangely enough, I download my photos from the web.
  • In the relevant Picasa gallery, I click on the "View Map" button.
  • When the map comes up, I click on the "View in Google Earth" button. This starts downloading the KMZ file of my web gallery. I save it onto the hard drive and open it in Google Earth.
  • Then I move the entire KMZ folder into the Photos subfolder. (Yes, this means that there's a subfolder that holds nothing but a subfolder, but when the entire hike is saved as a KMZ file, this clears up. I don't know why that is, but this is the hack I use to get around it.)
  • By going through this extra step, the Picasa web gallery formats all of the pictures so that they have links to the corresponding pages in my web gallery.
• Incidentally, Picasa has a "View in Google Earth" function that allows me to see all of my geotagged photos at once, even the crappy ones I didn't want to upload. But that isn't helpful when I upload my hike to the web.

Step Seven: Converting to KMZ.

• After doing whatever finishing touches I need to do, I right click on the folder for the hike and select "Save as" to save it as a KMZ file.
• Next, I upload the file to my website.
• Now, I can view the file in Google Maps by plugging the URL of the KMZ file directly into Google Maps.
• I make a note of the URL of the Google Maps page so that I can post it to my journal. Usually, though, I hack my own Google Maps URL using this format: "http://maps.google.com/maps?q=[URL of KMZ file]&t=h". The extra bit at the end ensures that the map comes up in hybrid mode, which is the most useful for this kind of map.

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: