igc2kmz IGC to Google Earth converter

igc2kmz converts paraglider and hang glider track logs into Google Earth KML format with lots of features, notably:

• track colored by altitude, climb rate and ground speed
• shadow feature makes it easier to judge the track's altitude by eye
• animation of the flight
• photos automatically placed where they were taken and with an optional comment
• XC optimisation output
• altitude graph and high and low points labelled
• thermal and glide analysis
• time marks

It's used by the following XC league servers:

• Leonardo
• UK National XC League

Just upload your flight to one of these and you can download your flight in Google Earth format without having to install any extra software on your computer.

It is designed to run on XC league servers, and as such is not designed to be directly used by pilots.

Requirements

• Python version 2.5 or 2.6, not version 3.0

Get the code

Download either the zip archive or the tar.gz archive.

Unpack this archive somewhere.

If you want to track development then you can checkout the source code with git instead of downloading an archive:

git clone git://github.com/twpayne/igc2kmz.git

Run it

Change to the directory where you unpacked the archive and run:

bin/igc2kmz.py -i <input-filename>.igc -o <output-filename>.kmz

Customise it

You can set various parameters via the command line, including the time zone offset in hours relative to UTC. For example, use -z 2 for Central European Time during the summer. For individual flights you can override the pilot name and glider type (otherwise they are taken from the IGC file), set the line color and width, add optimized XC information and photos with comments. Run bin/igc2kmz.py --help for a full list of options. For example use, look at the Makefile.

Rebuild the examples

You can rebuild the example files with the command make examples. This will build the olc2002 flight optimizer, optimize a number of flights, and create the KMZ files in the examples/ subdirectory. Be warned that the flight optimization step can take a long time (30 minutes on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo).