RJ Tata’s Blog

I’ve been a huge fan of Google Earth since it launched. I’ve also recently purchased a Garmin Nuvi 650 GPS and the thought occurred to me – wouldn’t it be cool to pinpoint locations in Google Earth’s satellite view, and then somehow transfer them to the Garmin GPS? A quick search on Google and I notice that somebody has already figured it out! First, setup Google Earth to use decimal degree locations under Tools -> Options. Then you add a new folder under “My Places” in Google Earth and save your desired locations into that folder. Then you save that folder (by right-clicking it) as a *.kml file. Next, get your hands on the shareware program called POIEdit. Open the .kml file in POIEdit and you’ll see that you can save it as *.gpx (GPS exchange format) or *.csv (the Garmin comma separated POI format) file. Now you can use Garmin’s free POI Loader to load the *.csv file as a Custom POI (Points of Interest) on to your GPS. You could also use POIEdit to save the Google Earth file to other GPS formats as well. Happy navigating!