I am going to develop a mechanism to export as many as approx. 100 photos with their position information to a KML/KMZ file.
Just wondering what is the best practise to do this. My initial quick options are: 1. use html img tag in the description of a placemark to internally reference the actual photos wrapped in the internal "files" folder in the KMZ; 2. use html img tag in the description of a placemark to reference the URL of a photo (publicly accessible).
Option one involves writing all photos in the internal "files" folder of a KMZ. This would make it a massive file. Meanwhile, all photos would have to be loaded in memory during the loading of the KMZ file.
My question is with the option 2, if a particular photo would not be loaded until the user clicks on the placemark to open the popup balloon OR all the photos are loaded like the option 1?
Thanks!
Cheers, Alex
You can think of Google Earth as a specialized web browser and the HTML within a given placemark as being handled same way HTML in a web browser is handled. In option 2 the images are not downloaded until user clicks the placemark and the description balloon is selected and starts to render.
Option 1 you have a huge KMZ file as you describe that must be downloaded entirely to the client and unpacked locally. The file may be too large to download in a mobile device if you want Google Earth mobile users to view it. The Google Earth essentially unpack the KMZ then access images as in the case of option 2 when the placemark with that image is selected. Only difference is that the entire collection must be downloaded in one shot so the initial startup time is slower and depends on network speed.