Highlight whole countries in Google Maps

Question

I have a general question about Google Maps. I want to use Google Maps just for germany, but of course the neighbor countries are shown as well. The border of germany is rarely visible.

Is there a possibility to fade out the other, not used countries?

Answer 1

I was able to do this using the public World Country Boundaries.kml Fusion Table.

You'll need to add it as a Fusion Table Layer to your map.

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Firstly initialize a map zoomed out right out, centered so we can see most countries:

var map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById('map-canvas'), {   center: new google.maps.LatLng(30,0),   zoom: 2,   mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.ROADMAP }); 

Next add the FusionTablesLayer:

var world_geometry = new google.maps.FusionTablesLayer({   query: {     select: 'geometry',     from: '1N2LBk4JHwWpOY4d9fobIn27lfnZ5MDy-NoqqRpk'   },   map: map,   suppressInfoWindows: true }); 

That looks like this:

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With regard to:

Is there a possibility to fade out the other, not used countries?

If you look at the Fusion Table you'll see there are columns for Name and ISO_2DIGIT. We can filter on these by passing a where condition to the FusionTablesLayer, e.g:

  query: {     select: 'geometry',     from: '1N2LBk4JHwWpOY4d9fobIn27lfnZ5MDy-NoqqRpk',     where: "ISO_2DIGIT IN ('US', 'GB', 'DE')"   }, 

To give:

Answer 2

For any one who ends up here in the future, this seems to now be handled very well by Google Charts, the latest implementation of the deprecated link above

https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery/geochart