Hey guys, another quick question.
I’ve tried searching on the web and haven’t been able to find an answer to this question: is there a way to make a scaled printout of an image in Google Earth? I’m trying to print out an image of a site that I have to work with on 8.5x11 at 1:2500 but I can’t seem to find a way to scale it properly. Would I have to print to a .pdf then take it into Photoshop and scale it manually?
Many thanks in advance.
What I would do is get the relevant view in the Google Earth window, with the scale bar showing, and then take a screen grab (Alt+Print Screen).
Then open it up in Photoshop or a similar graphics program and count how many pixels long the scale bar is (easy enough to do using the co-ordinates of the pointer in the menu bar).
Let’s say the scale bar represents 250ft and occupies 100 pixels (I have no idea how realistic that is, not having Google Earth to hand).
The following assumes you are working in imperial - if you can do it in metric (with the scale bar in metric too) it would be simpler…
If you want a scale of 1:2500 it would make the maths easier if you can set the image to a print resolution of 208dpi (actually 208.33333… to be picky). Then, each inch on the printout (consisting of 208 pixels) will represent 2500 inches, so each pixel will represent 2500/208 = 12 inches, or 1 foot.
In my example, each pixel represents 250/100 = 2.5 feet. You want the 250ft scale bar to occupy 250 pixels, not 100, so you need to enlarge the image (scale it by 250%).
I think my maths above is right - it would be easier if I was working with a real example, it’s not all that complicated anyway!
You don’t need to do that, Google Earth has a “copy image” feature: Ctrl-Alt-C.
I’m not entirely clear on what the problem with scale you’re having is, but let me refer you to a very handy utility, gmapmaker:
It lets you actually download the raw tiles in either the satellite, road, terrain or hybrid versions. You can pick which level of zoom you use, so you should be able to get about the right size, though you might need to resize things in photoshop or similar. Also, if you try downloading huge swaths of high resolution images, the server will ban you for the day.
This would work for me, except that I’m using a Mac. The issue with Google Earth is that it doesn’t print to a specific scale; it just tells you the altitude you’re looking down from. My problem is that I want to show a site at a specific scale (1/8" = 1’ for example) but the program apparently doesn’t allow me to do that. My original question was if there was a way to do this, but it seems there simply isn’t.
Okay, I think I see. This is a bit of a pain, but you can always use the measure tool and painstakingly make it so the view area is exactly 1770.83 ft by 2291.66 ft. I don’t remember what happens when you do the export function within google earth, so you may have to trim away any borders or anything else it adds in, but that should get you close to what you need.
The problem is that the program doesn’t really have a way of controlling what the scale is. It could do feet per pixel or something, but every monitor and printer will size it a little differently.