KML Tours

How To

The KML Tour creator is a utility for taking your GPS tracks, and creating a Google Earth virtual tour out of them.

Simply upload your GPS tracks in KML format, and then view (or download) your tour as a converted output KML file.


GPS devices differ from one another significantly, as does the quality of satellite imagery available in Google Earth. This means that there is not one set of parameters that will work for creating each and every tour you may wish to create. Understanding what each of the advanced tour options does is important in being able to create visually pleasing tours. Additionally, it is important to make sure that the GPS coordinate data that you load does not contain erroneous points going off somewhere due to a poor signal, electrical interference, etc. Many GPS units come with software that will allow you to edit your track and remove way-points that are of this nature.

All tours that are uploaded are publicly viewable by all, but only the computer that created a tour originally will have the ability to change that tour’s parameters.

Here is an explanation of what each of the advanced tour parameters do:

Range – Distance from camera to view point. This can be as low as 100 feet for areas that have high resolution satellite imagery available. Most parts of the world look ok at 1000 feet. A height for fast road flyovers may go at 10,000 feet over even more.

Tilt – Angle from looking straight down to view point. Zero is straight down, 90 degrees is looking level with the horizon. If you want to look down and still see the horizon, you need a value around 70 usually.

Altitude & Altitude Mode – The altitude of the view point can be calculated 3 ways, from the surface of the Earth (Relative to Ground), from above sea level (Absolute), and it can also be ignored (Clamp to Ground).

Fly To Mode – Bounce is when the flight speed slows down to zero as it approaches each of the tour view point coordinates. Smooth maintains velocity from one view point to the next and the velocity only reaches zero at the end of the entire tour.

Coordinate Step – This is how many track waypoints we should skip each iteration in making the view point path. In other words, this tells KML Tours to skip to every nth waypoint. If your track consists of a lot of waypoints and you wish to make it go “faster” and skip some of the track detail, you can make this number larger like 20 or so.

Step Interval Duration – This is how many seconds the flight from one view point to the next should take. Normal values range from 0.5 seconds for a faster more jittery tour to 10 seconds for a further spaced view point path tour.

Heading Average Size – This is the “bucket size” used for calculating the heading of a view point flight direction. A value of 1 tells KML tours not to do any averaging. Any value larger tells KML Tours to use the next X waypoint immediate headings to calculate the current waypoint heading value. This can be used to smooth out some tracks with switchbacks and even possibly erroneous data. A normal range is 1 to 50.

Show Track – This tells KML Tours if you would like your viewers to see the original track superimposed as a blue line on the surface of the earth, or if you would like to “fly blind” and not see the track. Making the track visible has a down side in that the tour does not automatically start playing when opened in Google Earth and requires the user to right click on the tour in the tree view and select “Play”.


Lastly, if you have an iPhone, check out the FREE "Trail Guru" app. It will allow you to record your tracks on your iPhone and export them via their website. The KML track files that it exports can then be uploaded into KML Tours without any additional conversion required. TIP: Allow "TrailGuru" enough time to lock on to a good GPS satellite signal before starting to record your tracks. You can know if you have a good signal by the color of the Longitude and Latitude coordinates on the screen; Red = bad signal, Orange = ok signal, Green = good signal, Dashes instead of Long/Lat = no signal.