Guide

What's in your Google Maps Timeline files: phone exports and Takeout, explained

Depending on where and when you downloaded it, your Timeline might come as a single file from your phone or a zip full of folders from Google Takeout. Here's what each file is, what it contains, and which ones matter.

Exports from your phone (the current format)

Timeline.json (Android)

Exported from your phone's Timeline settings. It holds three kinds of information:

• Semantic segments: your history as Google understands it: visits (you were at a place from one time to another), activities (you travelled from A to B, with a likely mode such as walking, driving or flying, and a distance), and paths (the points along your route).
• Raw signals: lower-level location readings the phone collected.
• Your location profile: places Google has worked out as significant, such as home and work.

Places are stored as coordinates and Google place IDs, not names. That's why tools that read this file describe places by the nearest town or city.

location-history.json (iPhone)

Exported from Google Maps on iPhone. It contains the same kind of visits, activities and paths as the Android file, laid out a little differently: a list of segments, with coordinates written as text. Tools that understand one format can usually read both.

Google Takeout (older history)

Before Timeline moved to phones, Google kept Location History in your account, and Google Takeout let you download it as a zip. For most people that account copy no longer exists, but old Takeout zips can be the only record of earlier years. Inside the "Location History" folder you may find:

• Records.json: the raw log of location readings (latitude, longitude, time, accuracy), sometimes years of them. It's often by far the largest file, from hundreds of megabytes to over a gigabyte for long histories.
• Semantic Location History: a folder per year with a file per month (for example 2019_MAY.json), listing place visits, often with the place's name and address, and activity segments with the type of travel. This is the most readable part.
• Settings.json and Timeline Edits.json: your settings at the time and a record of manual edits. They don't contain your history itself.

Which file should I use?

• For recent years: the phone export (Timeline.json or location-history.json).
• For years before the move to phones: an old Takeout zip, if you have one.
• For everything: both. There I Went can read several files at once, including a whole Takeout zip, and combines them. Where the same day appears in more than one file, it uses the most detailed version so that nothing is counted twice.

Privacy

All of these files contain your precise movements. Keep them private, and be careful which tools you open them in. There I Went reads them entirely in your browser and never uploads them; you can confirm this by switching off your internet connection after the page loads, and it still works.