Google Maps Timeline Viewer

See what's actually inside your Google Maps Timeline export

In 2024 Google stopped keeping Timeline on its servers and moved it onto your phone. Good for privacy, bad for peace of mind: your years of location history now live on one device that could be lost, stolen, or reset, and the only copy you can make is a JSON export that nothing will open. People export the file, see it's several megabytes of curly brackets, and have no idea whether their history actually survived. This tool answers that question in about two seconds.

Drop the export in and you get a month-by-month coverage calendar with every day colored by whether it has data, a ranked list of your gaps, a table of visits with places and times, and totals for distance and activity. If you're checking whether your backup is complete before wiping an old phone, the calendar tells you instantly.

How to export your Timeline from your phone

On Android: open Settings, go to Location, then Location Services, then Timeline, and choose Export Timeline data. On iPhone: open the Google Maps app, tap your profile picture, open Settings, then Personal content, and look for the Timeline export option. Both produce a JSON file, usually called Timeline.json. That's the file this tool reads.

Older exports work too. If you downloaded your Location History through Google Takeout back when that was the way to do it, the monthly Semantic Location History files and even the giant Records.json are all readable here, and you can select several files at once to view them together.

For other JSON exports that aren't Timeline files, our JSON to Excel converter handles the general case.

What the coverage calendar tells you

Every day between your first and last recorded point gets a cell: green if the export contains data for that day, red if it doesn't. A healthy Timeline looks almost solid green. What people actually find is more interesting: a red stretch where a phone died and its replacement took a week to get set up, a blank month where a system update quietly turned Timeline off, a hard cutoff where an old phone's history never migrated. The gap list below the calendar ranks these blank stretches by length, so you know exactly what's missing and when it went missing.

That knowledge is worth having before you need it. If the export from your current phone starts in 2024 and you remember a decade of history, the older years are still on some device or in some old Takeout archive, and now is the moment to find them, not after the drawer phone gets recycled.

Visits, trips, and the CSV way out

Below the calendar you get the actual content: visits with their dates, arrival and departure times, and the place, named when the export includes a name, coordinates when it doesn't. Trips show up in the totals with distance summed in kilometres. Two download buttons turn all of it into CSV files, one for visits, one for day-by-day coverage, generated in your browser like everything else here.

If a spreadsheet is the end goal, convert the CSV to Excel and you can sort and filter your visits properly.

Nothing is uploaded, and that's the whole point

A Timeline export is one of the most sensitive files you'll ever hold. It knows where you live, where you work, which clinic you visited and how long you stayed. Uploading that to a random website would be reckless, so this tool doesn't ask you to. The parsing runs entirely in your browser with ordinary JavaScript. Disconnect from the internet after the page loads and it still works, which is the honest test of a claim like this. We couldn't read your history if we wanted to, because it never arrives.

Honest limitations

• No map view. This is a coverage and data checker, not a map replacement; drawing a decade of points needs map tiles from a server, which would leak the very data we refuse to touch.
• It can't recover what Google didn't export. If days are missing here, they're missing in the file, and no viewer can conjure them back.
• Very large Records.json files from Takeout can run to hundreds of megabytes; a modern browser handles them, but give it a few seconds.
• Place names appear only when the export contains them; the new on-device format often stores a semantic label like Home or Work, or just coordinates.

A real example

Say you're switching phones and you've read the warnings about Timeline data getting lost in the move. Before the trade-in, you export Timeline.json and drop it here. The calendar shows solid coverage back to March 2023 and then nothing older, which tells you your earlier history lives only in an old Takeout archive on your laptop. You load that archive's files here too, confirm they cover 2016 through 2023, and keep both files somewhere safe. Ten minutes of checking, and a decade of where-was-I is actually preserved instead of probably preserved.

Keeping your history safe going forward

Since Timeline now lives on your device, treat the export like a backup and make one every few months. Google also offers encrypted cloud backup for Timeline in the same settings screen, which protects against a lost phone but not against accidental deletion, so the periodic export is still worth the thirty seconds it takes. Check each export here before filing it away, because a backup you've never verified is a hope, not a backup.