Saving Places Data

You can save placemarks, shapes, and entire folders (and their contents) to your computer's hard drive. The placemark file or folder is saved as a single file in KMZ format, which you can open at any time in Google Earth.  You might want to do this for the following  reasons:

• You want to share the saved data with other Google Earth users.
  
  You can email any placemark, shape, or folder to another Google Earth user from within the Google Earth application, but you can also email any KMZ file located on your computer to a Google Earth user. In addition, you can post a KMZ file to the Keyhole BBS where other Google Earth users can view the information, or you can serve the file on your own web server or from any network location.  See Sharing  Places Data for details.

• You have so many places in your My Places folder that Google Earth startup is slow.
  
  Keep in mind that each time you start Google Earth, all the places data is processed during startup, even if it is not turned on in the 3D viewer.  Holding a large amount of data in the My Places folder can impact the performance of Google Earth, depending upon your computer.  By saving folders to your hard drive, you can improve Google Earth performance by then deleting the data from your My Places folder once they are saved to disk.  You can always open the data you save at any time.
   

Save individual placemarks, shapes or entire folders by right-clicking on the item and selecting Save As... from the pop-up menu.

Use the File dialog to save the placemark or folder to your computer.  Enter the name for the new file, and click Save in the Windows dialog. The placemark or the folder is saved to that location with an extension of .kmz.

Important: Placemarks created with Google Earth version 3.0 or higher cannot be viewed in older Keyhole clients. As an alternative, you can send an image file. See Sharing Places Data for details.