Create a Heatmap of Your Google Location History With This Tool
I am a lover of anything that takes textual data and turns it into something visual. This week I came across the Location History Visualizer , a tool that creates a heatmap using your Google Location History.
To create your own, you need to download your location history from Google first. You do this by going to the Google Archiver . All of your Google data is on by default, so first select “Don’t select” on the page and then scroll down to select “Location History” from the list. From there click Next and then Create Archive. Depending on how much data you have, this can take a while, so Google will send you an email when it’s done. It took me about 5 minutes to create. You will then receive a zip file to download. When you unzip it, you want to go to the location history folder and then find the .json file. You will want to upload this file to the renderer website.
Depending on how long Google has been tracking your location, generating a heatmap can take a long time (or very little). The site invites you to have a cup of tea while you wait. However, it took about a minute to create my map, which includes 796,172 different data points. Here:
After loading, you can also enlarge individual areas. Here is my USA only heatmap:
All rendering processing for this happens on your computer, so no one can access your location history except you, and also Google, which originally had it.
If you are a visual person like me, this will be quite nice to watch and play.