Recently I’ve completed placing some photos from an old cycling holiday Cycling the ring of Kerry, ‘04 into Google Maps. Although the interface provided is simple and effective, it’s not terribly great when dealing with a lot of photos and text.

In this instance I had to first upload the photos to this site, copy the URL to that photo and then build a place mark with the photo URL and some text. All in all a bit of a slog. I had thought about writing a clever ‘bulk entry’ tool but nah- it’s usually quicker to just sort it out manually. So I thought. On reflection a tool which allowed a quick ‘select photo’, ‘enter text’ and GO! uploading and creating a google maps placemark which could then be correctly placed would have been quicker. Even easier if the latitude/longitude were in the photo as well (as can be done with mobile phone and some cameras) then the placemark is perfect from the start. Apparently some Android phones do this integration as standard… At first I’d made one big map but Google Maps ‘pages’ after a certain length so only half your placemarks are displayed. Page onwards and the second set of placemarks becomes shown. Seems there is some limit to the number of displayable placemarks at once?

Backing up

Bit fiddly this one. View the map you want, look for the RSS icon. Copy that RSS link properties and paste into another browser tabs location bar. Change the URL to have ‘output=kml’ instead of ‘output=georss’ and load that URL. You will be offered a ‘.kml’ text file which is an XML format file detailing all your placemarks and links. That .kml file could be easily(!) transformed to be in the format for something else (that’s the beauty of XML) or can be imported back into Google Maps to recreate the map at a later date. Create a new map and look for ‘import’