Thousands of National Parks Pictures and Videos to Use in Google Earth

April 17th through 25th is National Parks Week in the United States. This is a good time to share that the U.S. National Park Service hosts thousands of videos and pictures about the various parks and forests under its care.

The vast majority of the pictures and videos in the collection are in the public domain which means that students can download and use them in their own multimedia projects. One interesting way to use those pictures and videos is to include them in Google Earth tours. If you’re not sure how your students might do that, take a look at this short video introduction to making a tour in the web version of Google Earth.

You can search the National Parks Service’s gallery of images and videos according to media type, location, or keyword. The licensing and re-use information for each picture and video is clearly listed. In general, the videos that are in the public domain have a download link and the ones that aren’t in the public domain don’t have a download link. The same is true for the pictures in the gallery.

A Crash Course in Google Earth

You can learn a lot more about Google Earth and Google Maps in my self-paced course, A Crash Course in Google Earth & Maps for Social Studies.