Zmarties

As people discover the power of Google Earth, they are producing larger and larger collections of placemarks.

Some fairly large collections include:

• my own Countries and territories of the World with ~260 entries
• UNESCO world heritage sites with ~790 entries
• World Club football teams with ~1800 entries

However, these are all eclipsed by two collections (presumably produced from the same raw data) of about 36500 cities in France: Collection 1, Collection 2.

Beware though - Google Earth shows why it it still in beta - it's extremely unstable, and when given sizable files is very prone to crash. Note that a crash will lose any placemarks you have accumulated since you last started Google Earth - even if they are in the "permanent" section of the placemarks (ie. not just in the Temporary Places section).

So Google Earth team, please get your act in order, and do two things:

• write placemarks to disk as soon as you can, so they are safe if the program crashes (ie dont just wait until the user exits the program cleanly before you write anything to disk)
• add some proper validation so that it is not possible to crash the program with either malformed KML, or simply large collections of placemarks.

I find that the safe limit on the number of placemarks in a file is somewhere in the low hundreds - I've not had a problem with my countries file (and noone else has reported problems with it to me), but stepping up beyond 500+ placemarks more often than not causes a crash.