Comments on: Exporting Shapefiles To Google Earth IV – Shape2Earth

By: Leszek Pawlowicz

Leszek Pawlowicz — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:23:49 +0000

200 meters is about the difference between NAD27 and WGS84; are you sure your shapefile is in WGS84?

If yes, MicroDEM has a function that lets you shift shapefiles by a specified distance.

By: Hiliadan

Hiliadan — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 09:30:54 +0000

Argh, after spending a lot of time to search for a way to convert .shp into .kml, I eventually found that the website I found in the first place (this one) had all the solutions……. And moreover, I scrolled over the link to this article (I found the 5th article first) but I didn’t realize what was written… What a waste of time !

Actually, I found Shape2Earth by myself and used it.

But I had two little problem though: the polygons were not exactly where they should have been (200m away maybe) and as I had no indications of the altitude, I could not use a field to define it, which lead to a display issue in GoogleEarth: the polygons were not filled with color. I “fixed” this second problem by updating altitude to “Relative to ground” and +14m in GE.
So I’m wondering: is there a way to move all the shapes/polygons in MapWindow GIS or in GE in the same direction and of the same distance ? I guess I can select each shape in MapWindow (I didn’t find a way to select all of them easily) and then move them by dragging them… but that’s not very precise and that’s boring…

By: High-Resolution Sea Level Rise Effects In Google Earth | Free Geography Tools

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 23:03:07 +0000

[...] the shapefile into a Google Earth KML file. For this, I’ll use the $30 MapWindow plug-in Shape2Earth (you can try it out in free demo mode for this as well). The steps are straightforward, and similar [...]

By: peter

peter — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 06:13:37 +0000

Hi. Thanks Frank for mentioning Shape2Earth. I wanted to just make a couple of comments here. One, I want to thank the developer of Shape2Earth for making this plug-in. Also, its not clear in the quick news piece, but Shape2Earth is a plug-in for MapWindow, which is a free open source GIS that only runs on Windows. However, it does run very well with Parallels on an Inel Mac and it is this environment which I mostly use it. So for basically $30 you get plug-in that otherwise would require spending over a grand for ESRI’s ArcGIS plus another $99 at least for Arc2Earth. While Arc2Earth has more features, Shape2Earth is very good and the developer seems very committed to making it even better. So, even if you are a Mac user, this tool has its place if you use Boot Camp or Parallels on an Intel Mac. qGIS is a nice open source GIS on the Mac, but I have yet to see any developers making a similar module as Shape2Earth for KML creation from shapefiles.

Thanks,