Style your places

You can customize the appearance of individual features like placemarks, lines, and polygons within your Google Earth projects. This lets you highlight important locations, categorize features, and enhance the visual storytelling of your map.

This page focuses on styling features you add or draw directly in your project. To learn how to style large datasets imported as layers, see Style data layers.

Edit feature styles

  1. On your computer, open Google Earth.
  2. Open the project containing the feature you want to style.
  3. Select the feature on the map or in the map contents panel on the left.
  4. Click the Edit icon that appears next to the feature name or in the inspector panel.
  5. The edit panel will display options for changing the feature's style, in addition to adding descriptions and media.

Style placemarks

In the edit panel for a placemark, you can adjust:

  • Icon size: Choose from presets like Small, Medium, Large.
  • Icon color: Click Choose color to select a different color for the icon.
  • Icon type: Click the current icon to choose from a library of icons. Click More icons for an expanded gallery.
  • Custom icon: Click Upload custom icon to use your own image (JPG or PNG).
  • Label style: Click More settings to modify the label's text color, size, and visibility.

Style lines and polygons

In the edit panel for lines or polygons, you can adjust:

  • Stroke/outline color: Change the color of the line or the border of the polygon.
  • Stroke/outline width: Adjust the thickness of the line or border.
  • Fill color (Polygons only): Change the interior fill color.
  • Fill opacity (Polygons only): Adjust the transparency of the fill.
  • Label style: Click More settings to modify the label's text color, size, and visibility (if a label is present).

Bulk styling

You can apply style changes to multiple features at once:

  1. In the map contents panel, select multiple features using Shift-click or Ctrl-click (Cmd-click on Mac).
  2. With multiple features selected, an edit panel will appear allowing you to change common style properties (for example, color or icon size) for all selected features simultaneously.

Other feature properties

Beyond visual styles, you can also:

  • Add descriptions and media: Click + Description or + Media in the edit panel to add text, photos, and videos to your features.
  • Change visibility: Use the / icon next to the feature name in the map contents panel to show or hide it.
  • Reorder features: Drag features within the list in the map contents panel to change their order in the list. Note that this does not change their drawing order on the map.
  • Capture map view: Adjust the map view (zoom, tilt) to your liking, then click Capture view in the feature's edit panel to save that specific view with the feature.

Your changes are saved automatically to your Google Drive project.