Open your Google Maps Timeline export: places, trips and days, saved as GPX or CSV

What it shows

The whole file at a glance: the first and last day, how many days have data, the number of visits and trips, the total distance, and which export each part came from.
Any day, from a list of every day in the file (or step with ‹ and ›): each visit with the place's name and address when the export holds them, the arrival and departure in local time and how long you stayed; each trip with its activity (walking, driving, cycling, bus, train, flying…), its distance and its duration. A stay that runs past midnight is listed on both days.
The day's route, drawn on a plain canvas from the coordinates in the file: every trip as a line coloured by how you travelled, every visit as a numbered circle matching the list, north up, with a scale bar.
Where the time went: the 15 places where you spent the most time in the whole file, with the total hours, the number of visits and the last visit.
Distance by activity, per year: kilometres walked, driven, cycled, flown and so on, year by year.
Save the whole file or the chosen day as GPX (one waypoint per visit, one track per trip with every recorded point and its time) or KML (placemarks with time spans, for Google Earth), and the visits and trips as two CSV files for a spreadsheet.

Getting the file

Android phone: Since Google moved Timeline onto the phone (announced December 2023), the history lives on the device. Open the phone's Settings › Location › Location services › Timeline, then Export Timeline data; it saves Timeline.json. The menu names vary a little between phone makers.
iPhone: In the Google Maps app: your profile picture › Your Timeline › the ⋯ menu › Location and privacy settings › Export Timeline data. Menu names differ a little between app versions. It saves location-history.json, a list of the same visits and trips with points written as geo:48.137100,11.575400.
Google Takeout: An export made at takeout.google.com with “Location History (Timeline)” ticked holds Records.json (every raw position fix, often hundreds of megabytes), Settings.json and, in exports made before the move to the phone, a Semantic Location History folder with one file per month (2019/2019_JULY.json). Drop the ZIP as it is: the page finds those files inside without unpacking the rest.

The exports, and what this reads in each

File	Holds	Place names	How it is recognised
Timeline.json (Android)	`semanticSegments`: visits, trips (activity, distance in metres) and path points with local times and their UTC offset; `rawSignals`: recent position fixes; `userLocationProfile`: which places are Home and Work	no: Google place IDs and coordinates only; Home and Work are named from the profile	a top-level `"semanticSegments"` list
location-history.json (iPhone)	the same visits, trips and paths, with every number as text	no: place IDs and coordinates	a top-level list whose first item has `startTime`, `endTime` and a `visit`, `activity` or `timelinePath`
Semantic Location History (Takeout, one file a month)	`timelineObjects`: `placeVisit` and `activitySegment` entries with distance, activity type and a simplified raw path	yes, with the address	a top-level `"timelineObjects"` list
Records.json (Takeout)	every raw fix: `latitudeE7`, `longitudeE7` (degrees × 10⁷), a timestamp, accuracy and Google's guess of the activity	no, and no visits or trips either: they are worked out here	a top-level `"locations"` list of fixes with `latitudeE7`
Takeout .zip	any of the above under `Takeout/Location History (Timeline)/` or the older `Location History/`	as for the files inside	ZIP entries in those folders, read from the ZIP's own directory

How the figures are worked out

Distance: For a trip, the distance Google wrote into the file (distanceMeters or distance). Google measured it along the way it thinks you went, so a 15.3 km drive can join two places 3.4 km apart in a straight line. Where a trip has no distance, it is measured here along its recorded points by the haversine formula (the earth as a sphere of radius 6,371,008.8 m), and marked “measured along the path”.
Days and times: The on-device exports carry each segment's UTC offset, so days and times are local to where you were, even abroad. Takeout files store UTC only; there the time zone of the device you are reading on is applied, so a trip in another time zone shows at your home time.
Stays from Records.json: Records.json has no visits. When nothing else in the export gives them, a visit is any run of fixes all within 150 m of their centre for 10 minutes or more (two such stays at the same spot less than an hour apart are one), and a trip is the fixes from the end of one stay to the start of the next, measured along them and named after the activity Google guessed most often on the way. Google's own Timeline used a richer model, so its visits will not match these one for one.
Top places: Visits are grouped by Google place ID, else by name and address, else by coordinates rounded to about 100 m. A visit nested inside another (a shop inside a shopping centre, hierarchyLevel 1) is not counted twice.
Large files: The file is never read into memory whole: it is sliced into 4 MB pieces and each visit, trip or fix is parsed on its own. A generated 110 MB Records.json (400,000 fixes) is parsed in under two seconds on the desktop machine this page is tested on, so a 500 MB one takes several seconds there, and longer on a phone, which may also run short of memory for the result.

A worked example

The page is tested with a made-up two-day export written in all four shapes. On Saturday 2 March 2024 it holds Home from 07:00 to 08:30, a 1.2 km walk to Café Frischhut (20 min), 50 minutes there, a 15.3 km drive to work (30 min), work until 17:00, then 8 km by bike home, where the visit runs until 10:00 the next morning; on Sunday a 2.5 km walk to the Englischer Garten and an hour and a half there. The page lists Saturday as 4 visits, 3 trips and 24.5 km, and Sunday as 2 visits (the night at home is on both days), 1 trip and 2.5 km; the top place is Home with 17 h 50 min over 2 visits. Saved as GPX, the two days are 5 waypoints and 4 tracks of 5 points each, and the GPS track viewer reads them back with the same first and last coordinates. From the same days written as raw Records.json fixes, the page works out the same 5 stays and 4 trips by itself, each stay within a few minutes of the real one.

What this cannot do

No street map underneath. No map tiles are loaded, by design: a tile server would learn exactly where you have been. The routes are drawn on a blank background, to scale, north up. To see them on a map, save the GPX or KML and open it in a mapping app or Google Earth.
Place names only where the export holds them. The Takeout Semantic Location History has names and addresses. The phone exports and Records.json have only coordinates and Google place IDs; this page does not look names up, because that would send your places to a server.
Nothing is sent anywhere, and nothing goes back into Google: the page cannot edit your Timeline, restore it to a phone, or merge two exports into one file Google Maps would import.
Not every file in the export. The encrypted cloud backup of Timeline cannot be read (only the phone can decrypt it), and Timeline Edits.json, Settings.json and the visit candidates Google considered but rejected are skipped. Wi-Fi scans and activity records in rawSignals are counted out; only its position fixes are used.
Not Google's Timeline. The name is used only to describe the file. viewhack is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google, and its visits from raw Records.json are its own estimate.