A quick trick for viewing a KML map file directly in Google Maps without downloading it or opening Google Earth.

If you need to open it to examine the contents, just rename it from “file.kmz” to “file.zip” and it’ll unzip the same way as any other compressed file.

That did work for image overlays but not placemark popups. We then tried uploading the KMZ file to Google Drive, as the new Google Earth has built in support for opening files from Google Drive.

The powers-that-be would like the public to be able to download a KMZ file so users can open it with their copy of Google Earth rather than using the plug-in. Problem: our CMS cannot host KMZ/KML ...

Then, on your other computers, open Google Earth and select File>Open. Open the .kmz file.

Google Earth also allows you to save layers of geographically indexed data -- like markers for ranger stations in a certain area -- as KMZ files. You can access any data from these files, indexed ...

Google has the map images, we only have to download the KMZ file to our computer and have access to all the info, without all that painful and time-consuming cataloging that other people have done ...

Google Earth users can now search publicly available Keyhole Markup Language (KML) data files, also known as map layers.