Google Earth Hacks blog

This is a pretty simple one.  I often find myself quickly needing to get the latitude/longitude for a particular point, and there’s not a simple way to get it.  There’s some easy ways, but none that are just simple and quick.  That’s what this fills.

Fire up Easy LatLon and browse around using the Google Earth Plug-in.  You can use the search box to find a location at the top by name or by address.  Every time the camera stops moving, the lat/lon on the left side of the page are updated.

Suppose you wanted to know the location of Yankee Stadium.  Go to Easy LatLon, type in “Yankee Stadium” at the top, and the results are there on the side.  Copy/paste them to whatever you need.

Like I said, it’s very simple.  I hope it’s helpful for you from time to time.

http://www.gearthhacks.com/easylatlon/

We’ve just reached a cool milestone.  One our most prolific file submitters, SpiderX22, has now had his files downloaded over a million times! He’s submitted more than 1200 files to the site over the years, and the total downloads for those files has just passed 1,000,000.  Great work, Spider!

I also want to recognize two other big submitters — McMaster_de and sladys.  They’ve both submitted more files than Spider has, though neither has reach a million downloads yet.  McMaster is well over 900,000 and will probably reach a million pretty soon.

You can see the full list of our Top 50 Submitters on this page.

It’s worth mentioning that sladys has also been an animal with our StreetView area, adding more than 3300 locations to that database!  He’s the main reason that section of the site has grown as large as it has.  There are a lot of neat things to find in there, so be sure to check it out.

Just a quick, fun note — the number of registered users in our forums has crossed the 100,000 mark.  Wow!

Thanks to all of you who have contributed over the years, and we look forward to many more!

Those those of you that use our forums and use Twitter, here’s a new account for you to follow — @GEHforums.  This Twitter account simply takes any new threads in the forums and tweets out the title of the thread and a link.  It’s a good way to keep up with new discussions without having to wade through the forums each day.  If you participate in a thread, then you can just “subscribe” to the thread when you’re posting to automatically receive e-mail updates of new posts.

Also, don’t forget about the main @gearthhacks Twitter account.  It currently posts items from the blog, but soon we’ll be pushing new file uploads to it as well.

Thanks!

Mickey

If you’re away from home and looking for something to kill some time, we’ve got your answer — GEH: Mobile.  It’s thousands of files from our database in the palm of your hand, in the format of a simple mobile website.  It’s designed with the iPhone in mind, but should work well with any recent smartphone.  Having only been able to test on an iPhone, I’d love to get some feedback from other smartphone users (N95, etc).

The mobile site gives you quick access to about 80% of our file library (no 3D models or image overlays).  You can view the newest files, most popular file, or view them by category.  Every file has a thumbnail, and will link you to the real location on Google Maps — on the iPhone it will launch the “Maps” application and take you there.  In addition, you can sort items by date/popularity, read full descriptions and view comments made by other users.

Visit the site on your phone by going to m.gearthhacks.com.  If you save a bookmark to your home screen on your iPhone, you’ll get a custom GEH icon as shown above.  Below are a few screenshots.

Have fun!

Exactly five months after it first launched, our StreetView section received its 2000th file — not bad!

File # 2000 was a good find — a clear shot of the streetview car in a mirror on the side of the road.

Of the 2000 files, the most popular (by votes) is the “burning car“, which is pretty self-explanatory.  The most-viewed file is “girl changing clothes at car“, with over 24,000 views.

We’ve got some big plans to improve our StreetView section even further, so keep sending us your great finds!

Mickey

We’ve already showed you how you can embed any of our files and collections on your own site, but what if you just want to show someone your house, school, or some other location in Google Earth?

Up until now, you had to:

• Open up Google Earth
• Find your location
• Create a placemark
• Title the placemark
• Save the placemark to your PC
• E-mail to a friend

While those steps are worthwhile if you have a complex creation to share, they’re kind of overwhelming for just sharing a single location.  Welcome, ShareIt!

Using the Google Earth plug-in, ShareIt makes it very simple to share locations with your friends, and/or embed them on your own site.

• Give your location a title
• Find it in Google Earth (using the plug-in)
• Submit!

The script will automatically create a new page for the item, a KML for Google Earth, and embed code for your own site, so you can do whatever you want with it.  You don’t even need to log-in to create an item — just do it!

I’m going to the Georgia Aquarium tomorrow, so here’s a quick look at that amazing building:

Try it out for yourself and let us know what you think.

Note: The plug-in doesn’t current work with Firefox 3, but according to the comments on this post at Google Earth Blog, we should see an update for it any day now.

We’ve just added support for the Google Earth plug-in to another area of our site — the collections.

Now, when viewing a collection you will see a link that says “View this entire collection using the Google Earth plug-in”.  This will bring up a page with the plug-in on the left and the collected files on the right.  Click a thumbnail to fire it in the main window.  It makes browsing collections much easier!  Here is an example using the NASCAR collection.

But we’ve taken it a step further.  If you see a collection that you like, you can grab the embed code and embed it on your site!  The script will build a smaller, more lightweight version of the collection designed to run on your site.  Here is the NASCAR collection using the embed code:

Since we’ve already built support for you to view our entire collection of 20,000+ placemarks using the plug-in, it only makes sense that we give you the power to embed those, too.  If you view ANY of our files on their Google Earth Plug-in page (like this page for the Hoover Dam), there is some embed code on there now, too!  Here is the Hoover dam using the embed code:

If you have any questions or problems, please let us know.

To go along with all of the new features from a few weeks ago, we’ve just added an arcade to the forums.

I’ve installed a handful of fun games, so check them out and see if you can top the leaderboard.

If you have any game suggestions or problems, please use our Site Issues and Questions forum.  Have fun!

We’ve just upgraded our forums to vBulletin 3.7.0, which adds a ton of new features!  Some in particular:

• Some social networking kinds of features, such as friends and groups.
• You can create photo galleries, either for yourself or as part of a group.
• Your profile pages are much better looking and more informative.  Here is SpiderX22’s profile for an example.  In addition to the new vBulletin features and layout, your profile page also shows how many files you’ve uploaded, how many StreetView locations you’ve added, and your current progress in GEMMO.  You can also leave messages for users directly on their profile page.

There are a ton of other small bug fixes and enhancements, but those are the major changes.  If you have any problems, please let me know.  Have fun!