Record a Tour with Google Earth

Last week I told you about Google Earth’s latest version – 5. I want to give you a sample of just one of it’s new features, ‘Record a Tour.’ Every traveler I know likes to share their travels and we’re always looking for better ways to do it. You need to use maps to show where you’ve been, and you want to show pictures or video too. Now, with Google Earth, you can actually take them there.

First, you need to create your places. For this short sample, I just created 3 places in Florida:

Then, to start the recording, you click the ‘Record a Tour’ button in the toolbar:

When you do that, you will see a small set of controls in the lower left corner. You click the red button to record movement and the microphone if you want to record your voice as well.

When you’re done, you can save it and you will see the ‘Tour’ show up along with your places. This tour is a Google Earth .kml file that can be emailed to anyone and they can view it using Google Earth. If you want to have a movie file that you can upload to Youtube, for example, you need the Pro version with the Movie Maker module.

To create the movie below, I played the Google Earth Tour on my computer and recorded the screen with my screen-recording software, Camtasia. It’s very short and simple. I hope it sparks some ideas for sharing your travels!

Chris Guld, www.GeeksOnTour.com

Computer Education for Travelers