When Google Earth stops being enough for a field team
Google Earth is the right tool for looking at a KMZ. It opens one in a double-click and draws better terrain under your points than anything else free, and if all you need is to see where the points are, stop reading — it already does that. This post is about the step after, when four people have to put points on the same map in the same week.
Checked on 1 October 2026. Every documented figure below is quoted as its page publishes it, with that page's URL in a code span beside it so you can read it yourself today. They are someone else's numbers and can change without notice — Google says so about its own Maps JavaScript API figures: Note: These limits are subject to change at any time. on , read 1 October 2026.
The limits are not Google Earth's, they are Google My Maps'
We went looking for Google Earth's import ceiling and did not find one. Across 35 Google Earth Help articles and 15 Google My Maps Help articles read on 1 October 2026, the strings 5 MB, 2,000 rows, 10,000 lines and 20,000 data table appear in zero Google Earth articles and only in My Maps ones. Every hard number a field team runs into belongs to Google My Maps, which is where a map is edited; Google Earth is where the result gets looked at.
So every cap below names My Maps in the same sentence as the number. And where Google's pages say nothing, this post says they say nothing rather than that no limit exists: the current Google Earth web and mobile help is served through a JavaScript panel that cannot be crawled, so an absence there is an absence in what we could read.
What Google My Maps documents, with the page and the date
On importing, read 1 October 2026 at , Google My Maps states four caps: Unzipped KML and KMZ files can be up to 5 MB., Other files can be up to 40 MB., Do not import files with more than 2,000 rows. and You can import up to 100 photos at a time. The first is ambiguous twice over, which is why it is quoted and not interpreted: My Maps' 5 MB can mean the size after unzipping or the size of the file you hand over, and it can mean 5,000,000 bytes or 5,242,880. The page does not say which.
On the map itself, from on 1 October 2026, Google My Maps says Maps have the following size limits: and lists Up to 10,000 lines, shapes, or places, Up to 50,000 total points (in lines and shapes) and Up to 20,000 data table cells. Divide the last by the one before it and a My Maps map at its documented feature ceiling has room for two attribute columns — a status and a name, nothing after that.
Per layer, read the same day, Google My Maps says A layer can have 2,000 lines, shapes, or places. on and Maps are created with one layer, but you can have up to 10. on . Two My Maps pages spell that layer cap differently — the map-limits page drops the Oxford comma — so quote whichever one you cite.
The figures a search answer box hands you for "Google Earth KML limits" are a third product's. It has limitations on file size (3MB raw or compressed, 10MB uncompressed KML), image size (500KB per KMZ file), network links (10), and features (1,000 document-wide). is the Maps JavaScript API's KmlLayer, read 1 October 2026 at . Different product, different renderer: those five figures are not Google Earth's and not Google My Maps'.
What we ran, and what we did not watch Google do
The file side we measured ourselves, with one rebuildable script that writes N placemarks, each with a name, a one-line description and two extended-data fields, at decimal coordinates from -60.670000,2.820000. At 345.8 bytes each, 10,000 placemarks make a 3.30 MiB file — inside Google My Maps' documented 5 MB, so for lean records the My Maps feature cap binds first.
Add a sentence of field notes and the two caps trade places. Padding each description by 200 characters takes the same 10,000 features to 5.21 MiB, past the My Maps line, and at a 745-byte record the count fitting under My Maps' 5 MB falls to 7,041. Neither My Maps page mentions the other's cap. The two readings of My Maps' cap are worth 699 placemarks on their own: bisected, our file crosses 5,242,880 bytes at placemark 15,130 and 5,000,000 at 14,431. Compression makes it worse — a 0.14 MiB KMZ here held a 9.02 MiB KML, 64 times its size, clearing My Maps' 5 MB easily under one reading and missing badly under the other.
Then the honest part: we did not watch Google refuse a file. Google Earth Pro is not installed here, importing into Google My Maps needs a signed-in Google account that is not ours to drive, and the URL-fed path needs a publicly hosted KML we did not publish. The documentation says a file over the My Maps cap is over the cap; what nothing here saw is Google applying that, with a message or a truncation, or choosing a reading. Read the caps as published, not as observed.
The one-way door, and how a second machine gets the file today
Google Earth is where a My Maps map gets looked at, and Google writes down what that costs: Tip: This opens your map in Google Earth (view only). You can't edit your map in Google Earth. and When you make changes to your map in MyMaps, it’ll reflect in Google Earth when you refresh the map., both on , read 1 October 2026, describing the View in Earth control, which opens Google Earth for web. Read that as a map shared from My Maps opening view only — not as "Google Earth is read-only", because Google Earth Pro imports by a different mechanism.
That mechanism, read 1 October 2026 on , is a file copy, and Google Earth Pro's own page says so: In the directory, you’ll see a file called "myplaces.kml". This file has your saved locations. and There are a few ways you can transfer the file with your saved locations to another computer: Save the file in Google Drive Email the file to yourself Save the file to a USB drive. For most teams that is the sentence that decides it.
What a field team needs that a file and a reader cannot give
- One source of truth instead of a KMZ per phone. Google My Maps is where a map is edited, Google Earth is where it is read, and the read side refreshes rather than writing back. A file emailed round is one copy per person.
- Permissions. Google My Maps uses Google Drive's levels on the whole map:
Choose the access level from the drop-down menu: Can view or Can edit .on , read 1 October 2026. Nothing on the pages we read is finer than the map file — no per-layer, per-feature or per-field level, and no roles. - Offline capture that reconciles. Google My Maps is explicit twice:
Your maps are available only in Google Drive on the web. You can’t get to them offline.on that page, andTo use My Maps through a web browser, you must be connected to the internet. You can’t use My Maps offline.on , read 1 October 2026 — a page carrying its own dateline,Last updated: July 12, 2021. On a phone it is narrower still:You can't create My Maps on mobile devices. - A change history. Searching the same Google Earth and Google My Maps articles for
version history,revision,auditandwho editedreturned nothing, and nothing about two people editing one map at once. That is an absence in the pages we could read, not a claim the feature is absent.
Our KML and KMZ guide, in its "For teams" section, is the short version of that list.
For teams
What a team in this position has outgrown is the file, not Google Earth: keep Earth for looking at the result, and move the authoring somewhere built for several people and a bad signal. Geodocs keeps field data on a shared map with per-user access and offline capture that reconciles when the phone finds a network again. Every documented figure above was read on 1 October 2026 and can be edited by Google on any later day without notice, and nothing we run would tell us when — which is why the URLs are in the text.