The coordinates in KML are slightly different from the coordinates displayed in Google Earth.

Question

When I open a KML file in Excel, the coordinates of the same label are different from the coordinates specified in Google Earth. For example, the coordinate point of the label shown in Google Earth itself is 24.484138 °, 54.400700 °, but in KML (when opened in Excel) it is 24.48586802, 54.40060011. Please help me how to fix this. Thanks.

Answer 1

Base KML can have many decimal places in coordinates. This is what you will see in Excel, or if you view the KML file in a text editor.

Here is the KML label with 10 decimal places:

<Placemark> <name>Google office</name> <description>This is the location of Google</description> <Point> <coordinates>-122.0123456789,37.0123456789</coordinates> </Point> </Placemark> 

Google Earth stores all numbers, but displays up to 6 coordinates. This is not a loss of accuracy or precision - just a display problem.

But understand that the precision at ten-digit points in the coordinates is 10 cm. Each .000001 difference in the decimal degree of the coordinate is about 10 cm in length. Google Earth images typically have a resolution of 1 meter, and some locations have the highest resolution of 1 inch per pixel. One meter resolution can be represented using 5 decimal places, so no more than six decimal places are required.

Answer 2

Perhaps Google Earth stores the coordinates in a different coordinate system than it displays them. When I worked in GIS, it was customary to use several datasets that use different coordinate systems together. ArcGIS will automatically perform a basic transformation to fit all the data into a common coordinate system. I'm not sure Google Earth is doing something like this. You can get the best answer from gis.stackexchange.com .