Picasa Web Albums & Google Earth

Here's a quick and easy way to do use your own pictures for a place-based learning project using Picasa Web Albums and Google Earth. It's as easy as uploading your pictures to a Picasa Web Album and entering the location information. Once you do that, creating a Google Earth KML file with all your pictures is just a simple mouse click. Here's how it works...

First, upload your pictures to a new Picasa Web Album. Add captions and then click Edit Location. (Click images to see a larger view.)


Drag the placemark to where the picture was taken and click SAVE.



Repeat this process for each picture in your album. When you're all done, click "View in Google Earth. This will download a Google Earth KML file.



When the KML file opens in Google Earth, your pictures appear as placemarks along with your captions.



Clicking the the placemark opens an information bubble with a larger version of your picture and your caption.

Something like this would be a great way to follow up a class field trip or outdoor education experience. The example above was created with pictures from our 7th grade trip to Catalina Island. You could also share your own personal vacation photos with your class and add historical and geographic information relevant to your curriculum.

Would It Make A Sound?

This is a test to see if I can post pictures to my blog directly from Picasa. I'm already a fan of Picasa for quick and dirty photo editing. Many of our teachers use it for class pictures (parties, field trips, etc.) and to show slideshows to their class. This is just one more cool feature. (No Honda CR-V's were hurt in the making of this picture.)
Did I mention it's FREE? [picasa.google.com]

Here's a very basic help sheet for creating slide shows using Picasa.
[Make a Slide Show with Picasa]