The Animals in Google Earth

 

Nearly six years ago, the “National Geographic Magazine” layer was added to Google Earth. While we haven’t discussed it much lately, it remains one of the great gems inside of Google Earth. You can find it under the “Gallery” layer in Google Earth.

One of the best parts of that layer is the “Africa Megaflyover” photos that were captured by Michael Fay. Michael took over 92,000 photos while flying across parts of Africa, and hundreds of them are visible in Google Earth. The quality of the images is stunning, as shown here.

 

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User “Reggie98” in the Google Earth Community built a great collection of placemarks to highlight the African animals captured in these photos, and organized them by animal type. The original post is from 2005, but still does a great job of showing off the animals.

 

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There is a lot of great stuff to explore in the National Geographic layer, so go check it out. Also, with nearly 1.3 million subscribers, the Google Earth Community continues to be a great way to meet other Google Earth users and find answers to your questions. If you haven’t been out there in a while, we certainly suggest you check it out.

Enhancements to the mountains in Google Earth

While Google continues to add great new features and tons of new imagery to Google Earth, they want to be clear that they’re not forgetting about some of the basic layers such as the Mountains and Water bodies.

A few days ago they pushed out an update to the Mountains layer which includes some powerful new features, including a detailed information window, Panoramio photos, cross-section views of the mountain and tours that they’ve created for every mountain. For example, here is a video showing the tour of the Matterhorn:

For this feature to work, you need to enable the “Mountains” layer on the left-hand panel in Google Earth. Of course, an increasingly difficult challenge is finding the proper layers as Google continues to add more of them. For the Mountains, you’ll find it under “Borders and Labels” –> “Labels” –> “Mountains”, as shown here:

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In addition to the mountain layer changes, they’ve added thousands of new labels to the “Water Bodies” layer, which can be found just below the “Mountains” layer in the image above.

Hopefully Google will continue to finesse the organization of the layers section and make it easier to find the hidden gems like this one.