Creating Thanksgiving cards with Google Earth
by Timothy Whitehead on Nov.25, 2015, under 3D Models, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, California, Denmark, England, Germany, Google Earth News, Google Earth Tips, Google Sky, Google maps, Hawaii, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Natural Landmarks, Netherlands, Sightseeing, Street Views, USA
Back in 2006 Frank created a Thanksgiving card for Google Earth. Today we are looking at how to go about creating your own Thanksgiving greetings cards with Google Earth.
Firstly, you need an image with your Thanksgiving greeting. The easiest is to simply find a suitable image by doing a Google image search for ‘Thanksgiving’. Keep in mind that there may be copyright restrictions on such images, so they should really only be for personal use. Alternatively, you can get a bit more personal by creating your own image. That way you can write your own unique message. Ideally, you want to end up with an image that is roughly the correct proportions for the location you want to display it and also has a transparent background. Keep in mind that to use transparent backgrounds you need to save the image as a .png or .gif. We used Microsoft Word to create the image then took a screen shot and used Gimp to give it a transparent background. We used some clipart from OpenClipart.org.
Next, you simply create an image overlay in Google Earth (click this icon 
on the toolbar). Adjust its size and location to suit and select your image to be shown.
If you wish to send your greeting to someone else be sure to save the image overlay as a KMZ file so that it includes the image in the file. KML files do not include images.
If you want to go all out, you could also decorate the sky, as we did for Halloween. Just download this file
and replace the image in the overlay with your own Thanksgiving themed image.
Frank’s original Thanksgiving message. See it for yourself in Google Earth with this KMZ file
An updated version showing how easy it is to do. See it for yourself in Google Earth with this KMZ file
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