Shapefile → KML (OGC 07-147r2)
What you are seeing — you want to see a shapefile in Google Earth, and the converters you find either want an install or hand back something that lands in the wrong place.
KML is WGS 84 by specification — OGC 07-147r2 section 6.1 fixes it as longitude and latitude in decimal degrees. There is no element in a KML document for saying these coordinates are actually something else, and every consumer on Earth reads it as WGS 84.
That is the whole difficulty of this conversion, and it is why a converter can produce a file that opens perfectly and is still wrong. If your shapefile is in a national grid — metres from a false origin — its numbers are not degrees and cannot become them without the projection's parameters. If it is in degrees on a different datum, the numbers look completely ordinary and sit one to two metres away from where the KML will claim they are.
We refuse both rather than guessing. Where the file declares a system we can read and it IS WGS 84, the KML comes straight out. Where the datum is one no check can separate from WGS 84 — NAD83, ETRS89, SIRGAS 2000 — we say how far apart they are, cite who measured it, and ask you which your file means. Your answer is recorded as your declaration about your own file, and nothing else changes.
.shp, .dbf, .shx and, above all, the .prj..shp record already stores, so nothing is flipped.Drop the zipped shapefile and download it as KML. Free until 1 September 2026, 00:00 UTC · no account · your rows are discarded after the check.
Convert to KML →Measured on a file GBIF had already accepted and served — their validator asks will this load, and it had. Every figure is read from ops/data.json, never typed here. We issue no rating and no seal — each finding names the rule it applied.