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BaseCamp v4.7.0 lost it's View Selected Item in Google Earth menu


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A new version of BaseCamp (4.7.0) automatically came down and updated itself yesterday.
Now the VIEW menu no longer has View Selected Item in Google Earth, in fact, there are no other Google Earth selections either.
Did Garmin remove the Google Earth menu options? Has anyone else experienced this? The BaseCamp changes file for version 4.7.0 makes no mention of removing Google Earth.
 
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It had stopped working awhile back due to GE changes.  They probably did not want to fix it and then worry about it dying again later.  Basecamp development was dropped two years ago.  This update was only to meet EU regulations.

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You can export to KML and import it in GE.

 

3 hours ago, Red90 said:

It had stopped working awhile back due to GE changes.  They probably did not want to fix it and then worry about it dying again later.  Basecamp development was dropped two years ago.  This update was only to meet EU regulations.

It only stopped working because GE changed to a 64-bit program. If you uninstall 64-bit GE and install the still available 32-bit version it works again.

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Yes, but it still did not "work" and Garmin would have needed to make changes in order for it to function out of the box.  Basecamp is a dead program so they would not put any resources into it.  Removing features is quick and easy...

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Then you probably own a Mac. I heard there will be a 64-bit BaseCamp released 'later this year', which would have solved the problem.

 

It did work in Windows, but you had to tell Windows where to find the executable of GE:

* Open Command Prompt (Administrator).

* Type: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Google Earth Pro\client\googleearth.exe" /RegServer" and Enter. The path to googleearth.exe might be different.

* Close Command Prompt.

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"can also now" == about 2006-7. I can't remember if it was in Earth 3, but it was in Earth 4.0. Earth's been able to read GPX for a long time.

It was around 4.2 or 4.3 when I added geocaching-specific voodoo to it that lets it read a PQ specifically. You can drag and drop a (n unzipped) pocket query into Earth's 3D view and (though it asks you a kind of distracting dialogue) it'll render Geocache icons, cache container and size, with balloon content optimized for cachers like logs and links to other maps. It may be a bit dusty since I barely cache these days for health issues. Those same health issues are why I don't know the details of the precise Earth that's in play.

As for the Earth naming thrash, once Google Earth Pro became free back in 2015-01, the need to keep the consumer "Free" Earth dropped. The one that was kept had the feature set of Pro, but the outer shell was still the free version. There were reasons related to auto-updates that required the weird naming. Garmin rather uniquely reached into Earth's innards to run the copy of GPSBabel that was there to use its KML writer, so they're coupled unfortunately tightly. When things got renamed, Garmin's tools broke and that was a bummer.

 

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By the way, the removal of GE from Basecamp is now in the change log:

Quote

Changes made from version 4.6.3 to 4.7.0:

  • Updated BaseCamp to conform to GDPR requirements
  • Improved MTP device support
  • Removed online components of Garmin Adventures
  • Removed Garmin Cloud Drive support
  • Removed Garmin Connect find and upload
  • Removed Picassa photo sharing
  • Improved stability

If I read that part about Garmin Connect correctly, does this also mean that you can no longer send selected tracks to Garmin Connect? 

I wonder if the removal of Garmin Connect talking with other services and programs is a GDPR thing. At one point, Garmin said it was replacing the cloud drive with direct access to "your favorite cloud storage services" which I assumed was Dropbox, Google Drive, and whatever the one Microsoft has. And maybe iCloud. I see no mention of that in the change log. I think I'll refrain from upgrading at this time since the features I use (Google Earth and Garmin Connect) still work for me.

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26 minutes ago, capt caper said:

GE is going to charge big bucks now to companys using it in their programs,etc. This is why Garmin dropped it I bet.. look for other programs to drop it as well.

Well, Garmin was never using GE. It was simply exporting data from basecamp and sending it to GE (prompting the program to open).

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19 hours ago, capt caper said:

GE is going to charge big bucks now to companys using it in their programs,etc. This is why Garmin dropped it I bet.. look for other programs to drop it as well.

Google Earth for consumers has been and is likely to remain free. Do you have an authoritative source that says otherwise?

Source: 11 year software engineer working on Earth...

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4 hours ago, The A-Team said:

That's for Google Maps, not Google Earth. Even though they both use some of the same map data, they're different products.

Well, I am neither a developer nor a lawyer, so you may be right. I was simply pointing out a source for where this "rumor" about why Garmin  dropped GE from Basecamp may have originated. That said, it sounds like the there may be a common developers API platform for Maps and Earth: https://maps.google.com/help/terms_maps.html.

 

I am not disagreeing with you, but considering Googles greed and aggressive marketing, I would not be surprised if this change in Google's pricing and usage policy has something to do with Garmin's decision to eliminate the GE feature from BaseCamp. An interesting question to me is will the GE interface continue to work in the future for the Garmin BaseCamp customers who have decided to keep the older version of BaseCamp and not upgrade?

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2 minutes ago, alandb said:

An interesting question to me is will the GE interface continue to work in the future for the Garmin BaseCamp customers who have decided to keep the older version of BaseCamp and not upgrade?

It should. Everything executes locally, so it's not like any data is being sent to Google.

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I asked for an authoritative URL and you provided on that's peripherally related. You keep making up a connection where there is none. You've been told this by both the Google employee that helped Garmin develop this feature and independently. Maps and Earth are indeed related, but they're two different products. The word Earth does not appear on the page you cite and doesn't even offer the APIs being discussed. The only price change I can find for existing product is mobile StreetView and certainly the Desktop app is not using that. Google's "greed" is still providing unlimited mobile and embedded maps and for the new products, wanting to recover some costs  from the new features (of programs not being discussed here) for collection, development and serving images of the whole planet collected from satellites, planes, and cars. I get wanting everything to be free - it'd be awesome if my local Wal Mart offered that - but let's not confuse "won't give everything away for free forever" with "greed".

Basecamp's use of Earth wasn't anything magic IIRC - it just wrote its gdb or gpx file (or whatever it uses this week) and handed that to Earth (perhaps via Earth's copy of GPSBabel). You should be able to dot he same thing with a drag and drop onto our icon or screen or maybe a file->import. We probably broke it last year when we internally changed the name of the app from Google Earth Free to Google Earth Pro and thus, on Windows, changing the registry key name. Bummer that key had to change, but not difficult to recover. Did Garmin remove the feature rather than changing the name? Dunno.

Disclosure: I've been OOO on medical leave for several months. Maybe there's more to it than the public info, but I don't see any greed in action. Garmin just removed a feature that's easy enough to emulate in other ways.

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41 minutes ago, robertlipe said:

I asked for an authoritative URL and you provided on that's peripherally related. You keep making up a connection where there is none. You've been told this by both the Google employee that helped Garmin develop this feature and independently. Maps and Earth are indeed related, but they're two different products. The word Earth does not appear on the page you cite and doesn't even offer the APIs being discussed. The only price change I can find for existing product is mobile StreetView and certainly the Desktop app is not using that. Google's "greed" is still providing unlimited mobile and embedded maps and for the new products, wanting to recover some costs  from the new features (of programs not being discussed here) for collection, development and serving images of the whole planet collected from satellites, planes, and cars. I get wanting everything to be free - it'd be awesome if my local Wal Mart offered that - but let's not confuse "won't give everything away for free forever" with "greed".

Basecamp's use of Earth wasn't anything magic IIRC - it just wrote its gdb or gpx file (or whatever it uses this week) and handed that to Earth (perhaps via Earth's copy of GPSBabel). You should be able to dot he same thing with a drag and drop onto our icon or screen or maybe a file->import. We probably broke it last year when we internally changed the name of the app from Google Earth Free to Google Earth Pro and thus, on Windows, changing the registry key name. Bummer that key had to change, but not difficult to recover. Did Garmin remove the feature rather than changing the name? Dunno.

Disclosure: I've been OOO on medical leave for several months. Maybe there's more to it than the public info, but I don't see any greed in action. Garmin just removed a feature that's easy enough to emulate in other ways.

I thought it wrote a KML file, since Basecamp can export to KML directly.

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It writes its own native format and uses GPSBabel to make the KML that it injects into Earth, IIRC.

THat's ultimately basically how Earth reads GPX, Mapsource, Mapsend, NMEA, log, and most other consumer-oriented formats, too; it calls GPSBabel to convert to KML. That trick in Earth of dragging an unzipped PQ into Earth and having it render maps with tabbed interfaces with geocache details? That's GPSBabel doing that work.

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On 6/11/2018 at 2:02 AM, Mineral2 said:

By the way, the removal of GE from Basecamp is now in the change log:

Quote

Changes made from version 4.6.3 to 4.7.0:

  • Updated BaseCamp to conform to GDPR requirements
  • Improved MTP device support
  • Removed online components of Garmin Adventures
  • Removed Garmin Cloud Drive support
  • Removed Garmin Connect find and upload
  • Removed Picassa photo sharing
  • Improved stability

If I read that part about Garmin Connect correctly, does this also mean that you can no longer send selected tracks to Garmin Connect? 

Ran into this issue with no Google Earth link in BaseCamp, exists in MapSource and works fine. My primary use for BC is downloading Birdseye images. 

Is there a way to load BaseCamp 4.6.3 and replace 4.7?

Thanks

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18 hours ago, MtnHermit said:

Is there a way to load BaseCamp 4.6.3 and replace 4.7?

Couldn't find 4.6.3 but did find 4.6.2, so uninstalled 4.7 and installed 4.6.2 and all is good. Link for GE is in View and BC launches GE same as MapSource. :)

 

In my limited comparison, GE images are better than Birdseye . . . FWIW.

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