This is just a short follow up post from my recent blog about KML & Google Earth.  I didn’t want to tag this onto the end of the other post as that post ended up quite lengthy.  Here I’m going to talk about viewing your KML data from Google Earth in Google Maps, it’s quick and easy but I’ve not seen it mentioned often.  While you can do this directly from Google Earth using the “View in Google Maps” options from the file menu, it’s not as flexible as the approach I refer to here.

First off you need to extract the KML/KMZ information from Google Earth.  If you’ve got well structured data it should be easy enough in Google Earth to select only the data you want to view in Google Earth.  To do so right click on the folder with the locations you’re interested in and select “Save Place As…”

Save this KMZ  to somewhere on your PC where you’ll find it again.  Now you need to upload this to some online storage that currently.  (It should be noted that what I’m about to describe doesn’t work on SugarSync or Google Docs, I no longer have a Dropbox account so can’t comment on that.)  I upload my KMZ file to Amazon S3 and make it public, and then I copy a link to that file.

Moving over to Google Maps now I then paste the link into the search window and press return/enter, and voila, your Google Earth appears in Google Maps!  (You can try with this link, right click and Copy Link Address  - in Chrome anyway).

The advantage of doing it this way means you can show select which to show, or not, and if you have sub folders you can select to show them or not as well.