In our last lesson we looked at creating placemarks. In this lesson, we will be organizing them.

Enough talk let’s get started.

Organization of the places you are saving doesn't seem too important when you only have a few, but just wait. I have over 1,500 placemarks currently saved on one of my computers. Keeping track of these could be a monumental task without help. And help is as easy as the names you choose and the order you keep them within “My Places”. A good name is very important. Here are some examples of my placemark names.

Some bad names: Small USA, Mine, Moth Balls 1, Moth Balls 2 (not very descriptive)
Some better names: Phantom Plane, JailBall, SLAC (they only mean something to me)
Some Great names: MaineWestTSHS, Area 51, Low Flying SR-71 (names with meaning)

The nice part about the placemarks, you can rename them at will. Either Right Click on the placemark icon in the Viewer or the placemark name in “My Places”, then select Edit… The “Edit Placemark” window will pop up. Here you can change the name, the icon, and the description. Then click either OK to save the changes or cancel to forget the changes.

Another great way to keep your placemarks organized is with photo albums, that we call “Folders”. To make a folder, simply Right Click on the “My Places” icon. Mouse over the pop-up item, “New…”. Then click on “Folder” and a new window, “New Folder”, pops up.

Suppose we wanted to make placemarks of all the places we have lived, we could name this folder “Homes” or “My Domiciles”, and place it in the "My Places" folder. Then whenever we created a placemark of a previous residence, we would put it in this folder. Folders have other cool features; you can click on the box in front of the folder's name and this will toggle all of the icons for all of the placemarks, within, on and off; you can double click on the folder's name and the Viewer will zoom out to include all of the placemarks in the view; you can click on the + or – in front of the box to show or hide the contents of the folder. And one last item before we take a break, you can drag placemarks up and down in the “Places” window. You can also drag folders, and folders can live inside of other folders! In my example, you can see some of the closed folders; (Large Sample, Landing SFO) and an open folder (Circles).

Take some time and play with these features. Then come back to the next lesson, where we will look at sharing placemarks with others.