Export from Google Earth

[north-north-west]

Right. This is going to be slow and painful, so please be patient with the cybercretin.

My laptop had a mini-crash yesterday and spontaneously deleted all the waypoints, routes and tracks from Vantage Point. Now, I have the majority of the missing data on Google Earth, but I cannot for the life of me find a way to transfer that either onto the Garmin or the Magellan or a USB drive (which would be best). I can copy a track with the Garmin plugged in, but how do I paste it? There are options for importing files to GoogleEarth, but nothing for exporting - no neat little buttons that say 'press me if you want to put this data somewhere else'.

Help!!!!!! (Please?)

[andrewp]

Hi NNW,
In Google Earth right-click the folder you want to transfer and select Save Place as. Save it as a kml file (not kmz). You should be able to import the kml file into most GPS applications, including Vantage Point.

[north-north-west]

Its not quite that simple.
My main system is a Mac. The laptop is a Windows system that doesn't go online. So I need to transfer the files from the Mac to the laptop. And Macs don't do right clicks.
And there's no ''Save as' option for the tracks.

Edit: Hmmmm, actually I might be able to do that. Let's see what happens . . .

[north-north-west]

So far so good. Copied the stuff. Put it on the USB. Now to see whether it goes into VP.
Wonder why that works on folders but not individual tracks? And why on earth don't they explain this in the Help info? There's absolutely nothing in there under 'export' or 'transfer' or anything similar.

[north-north-west]

Well, it worked with the waypoints, but not the tracks. Apparently VP won't import KML files as tracks. I can import the tracks as routes, but I can't edit those the same way.

If only GE gave me the option of saving as a GPX file. Only thing to do is bung them into VP as routes, then upload them individually and get gpsvisualizer to change them into GPX files. Slow, but it should work.

Thanks, Andrew. At least the stuff isn't lost permanently. The ironic thing is it crashed as I was just editing one last track from my latest trip - after which I meant to back everything up onto USB. *&%$#! computers!

[bernieq]

From GE, you could save all the tracks in one kml file (select My Places and Save As, rather than save each track individually). Then run the whole file through GPSVisualizer and output one gpx file containing all the tracks. Then load that into VP - not quite as tedious, hopefully.

[north-north-west]

I don't know if gpsvisualizer will handle them all at once. I tried this morning and the connection timed out, but that may have just been one more Telstra glitch. I'll give it another go later.

[ken333]

You could try GpsBabel. Its free and converts Google Earth files to Gpx. Also, if you have some experience with Excel, you can paste the KML file into a sheet, extract the lon/lat/ele coordinates, and create a gpx track from them, using the standard Gpx tags, and concatenate the cells. Copy-Paste into Notepad, and save as a Gpx file. (Note gpx order is lat/lon, while kml is lon/lat).