How To Take a Tour

Starting a Tour

You start a tour by double clicking on the "Take a Tour" label. This activates Google Earth's animated tour feature. You will view the track from the point of view of a bird or airplane (depending on the selected altitude) flying overhead. You will probably zoom down to view pictures and may also pause briefly at track markers.

You activate the Google Earth Tour Controller when you move the mouse into the map. The Tour Controller, which is similar to a video controller, is located at the bottom left. It has Pause/Play, Fast Forward, and Fast Reverse buttons that adjust the direction and speed of the Tour. You can use to slider to go to any point on the tour. The slider setting value is the elapsed time since the beginning of the tour.

You enable the other Google Earth navigation controls when you Pause the tour. You drag the mouse to move the center of the map. You use the zoom control on the right to zoom the map in and out.

For additional information, follow this link to a Google Earth tutorial.

Viewing Photos During a Tour

When you fly over a Photo icon, Google Earth will zoom in and pop up a balloon containing the photo, the time the photo was shot and the photo caption.

You are invited to pause the Tour and manually explore other information available to you. You can click on the Camera icons to view the photo coordinates and other shooting information. You can zoom and pan the map to explore the vicinity of the the trip. You can click on photo icons to show the photo balloons. You may have to click again if there are several photos in the same location. Finally, you can click in the photo balloon to show an enlarged version of the picture.

The small fuzzy sphere icons close to the ground designate supplementary photos that are not included in the Tour. They are, typically, used when a group of photos are taken at one location.