Geograph Google Earth Clusters

This works in a similar way to the Geograph SuperLayer, by showing coverage overview, and then zooming in to reveal more detail. The Geocubes layer has the advantage that the clusters work into a closer zoom, and updates to the geograph database make it into the layer within hours. The SuperLayer is slower updating (weeks), but navigating should be much quicker being as its based on KML regions.

You can view also a Google Maps based version of the layer, using the Geocubes API directly.

This is only version 0.1 – there is more to be done – including being able to filter the results based on words and contributor, but this is exciting enough on its own. Once done a bit of work on tidying up the code plan to release it so others can use the geocubes service to create their own layer like this Watch this space!

This is a full set of 12 month variations for each of the original, topographic shading, and topographic & bathymetric shading variations of the original data.

If you haven’t already done so, load the layer now! Or if you already have it simply right click the top most ‘reference’ item and click Refresh.

… could be wrong, but think this is the first time that all layers are available for easy viewing in Google Earth.

If you have previously downloaded it then you should get the update automatically – otherwise right click the superlayer in My Places and select ‘refresh’ to fetch the latest version. It seems sometimes GE doesn’t reload the styles – so if all you see is a mass of yellow push-pins, restart GE and it should then return to nice circles and blue camera icons.

Or just download it here:

Geograph Superlayer (Google Earth Version 4+ REQUIRED)

· Geograph SuperLayer ·

By opening the above link you should be able to view the whole Geograph image collection directly in Google Earth. This has been possible in a number of ways for a while, but this does so in a much more compelling way (i.e. a single small download!).

This exploits the new Region functionality of GE4 to only fetch and load detail as you zoom in, in this way the view starts depicting a course overview of the current coverage, zooming in reveals more detail until pictures themselves become visible. (the ‘Super’ is adopted from Google’s term of SuperOverlays – overlays that load via nested regions)

In particular this is all pre-compiled and compressed, so should be fairly quick to download and is friendly as possible on bandwidth. Overall the layer consists of 102,965 files at 450MB compressed so there is a lot of data available, however you will download a lot less than this, probably on the region of a couple hundred files totalling about 2MB in a typical session.

As a small refinement, when a icon represents a single photo (a camera icon) if a view direction is stored the icon will have the top point in the appropriate direction. Also once the thumbnail is visible you can double click the thumb and the View will rotate to orientate the photo correctly!

Also this is only the first version, hot off the presses, so it not perfect yet, in particular would like to use Geograph specific icons (any Graphic Designers reading???), for example to give more feedback to the user on squares with many images, and view direction – also GE sometimes gets confused at the amount of detail available – plan to experiment to see if something can do about that.

… Hopefully users of GE3 should degrade nicely to use the View-based refresh method of viewing the dataset.

Oh and yes this is the little kml project I mentioned, see also other ways of loading geograph data into Google Earth or Google Maps via KML files.