Hi, thanks for the data. Just thought I’d pass on that I created a Google Earth version of the Natural Earth layers. Well…13 of the map layers anyway. I had to take a few liberties with the data to work around some of the limitations of Google Earth, but I think overall the results came out good.
You can find out more info here.
http://www.gelib.com/natural-earth.htm
Or skip right to it and open this file with Google Earth.
http://www.gelib.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/natural-earth_nl.kml
Matt
http://www.gelib.com
@ MattFox: This is great! I’m loving the marine labels in particular. Thanks for sharing 
How can we make it faster? It lags a bit on my new Mac using newer version of GE Pro. Is this a server issue or?
There will be a short delay the first time you load each layer since they are all separate downloads, and some as big as 5 megs.
Also, some of the layers really push GE to it’s limits and might lag a bit depending on speed of computer, memory, etc. Especially the layers with lots of polygons.
Can you set the physical area labels to no fill like the marine label areas? The boundaries all overlap because of the various scale ranks and they are meant to guide label placement only in this version (the edges need work still).
I removed the physical area polygons.
For the US, you might want to use Physiographic Regions of the United States for physical areas. I have a SHP file of these polygons from USGS if want it.
Sure, send it along to nathaniel@naturalearthdata.com. We try to use consistent measure and density around the world so I’ll sort thru and see how it compares and use it to adjust our boundaries at a minimum. Thanks!
Why is the admin-0 linework coming in jagged without as much detail as the original? Look at the Gulf of California where the Colorado outflows. The river no longer touches the shoreline. Maybe use the 50m shapes instead?
You might also try using the scale rank attributes in the admin-1 to do a “Larger states” and “smaller states” split instead of east-west. That attribute is present in all themes to allow filtering out features by map zoom level
I used the 50m shapefile for admin-0 and it looks to me like what you see in GE matches the 50m shapefile fairly accurately. I could use the 10m shapefile for admin-0 but there would be a significant performance hit unless I split it up, and I didn’t want to split them up.
Google Earth struggles a bit when displaying lots of highly detailed polygons. That is also the reason I split States between East and West. Try turning both East and West on at the same time and you will probably notice a lot of lagging as you pan around (at least my computer does).
There’s not really a good way to display lots of detailed polygons in Google Earth yet (at least not using the software tools at my disposal). I’m hopeful that this situation will improve in the future.
Matt,
I had a look at the SHP file you sent, Matt, and I agree Natural Earth should be using these new boundaries. They conform to the physographic regions better and are at the right level of generalization. I also note that there is sometimes new features in this new SHP file that NE doesn’t have now but should.
I’ll take some time after the holidays and adjust the NE boundaries to match these and add the new features in (like the White Mountains in New England).
Thanks!
Hi Matt, I just got a look at this and it looks really great! Thanks for sharing!
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