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As an avid traveler, Google Maps Timeline has long been one of my favorite hidden features. I’m used to opening it on slow Sunday afternoons and wandering through my own travel history. It showed alleyways I had forgotten, long layovers that blurred together while stepping out for a quick brunch across a new city, and impulsive last-minute rail journeys across Eastern Europe that never made it into photos. It’s always felt like a private travel diary logging everywhere I’ve been.
So the announcement that Google will be killing Timeline view as we know it came as a bit of a shock. The online timeline view is no longer accessible, and the only copy lives on your phone — unless you explicitly trigger a cloud backup. As with all things Google, if a feature is too good, it eventually gets killed (even if it’s in the name of privacy). For all practical purposes, Google was about to move a decade and a half of my location history behind a Takeout export. In other words, I could download my past travels or watch them vanish. If I cared about those memories, it was clear that I had to figure out a way to take ownership of that data. So I did the obvious: I looked up a self-hosted alternative.
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