Show HN: Generate interactive heatmaps from your Google Location History data | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Generate interactive heatmaps from your Google Location History data

theopolisme.github.io

67 pointsgrepper17 comments

This is really cool! For people who don't want to wait to upload their data, here are some annotated screenshots of interesting locations from my data (I had ~140 MB of it, accumulated over the last year):

http://imgur.com/a/9H6vb

It's amazing that I can zoom into a city that I've been to and nostalgically recount the story behind each location on the map. I can see this being a great storytelling aid that goes with your photo albums.

Since I started being a digital nomad 10 months ago, people have wanted to hear more about my travels. I always wanted to start building something like this, because it's nicer than saying "Singapore for 4 weeks, Hong Kong for 2 weeks, Seoul for 9 weeks, ..." Just show them the map and they can learn whatever they want to! Thanks so much for building this and keeping it open source.

Will share images or data when I compile mine when I get the time.

I put together a little imgur album with some examples from my own Location History: http://imgur.com/a/qLm1Q (I'm sure yours are much more interesting, though!)

location-history-visualizer is tool for visualizing your complete, consolidated, collected Google Location History. It works directly in your web browser – no software to download, no packages to install. Everyone deserves to know what data is being collected about them, without having to fiddle with cryptic pieces of software.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

Nice! :)

The only suggestion for improvement I can offer is to think through if it makes sense to "renormalize" the heatmap when I move the map or zoom the map. The current "normalization" has two for me unexpected effects:

a) My home and office is not colored "warmer" than many other places in my home town, although I bet I spend 90% of my time in those two places, and

b) I can see that I've been e.g. to Vienna, but when I zoom in I can't see anything - presumably because I've spent so little time there compared to my home town.

Some sort of "renormalization" of the heatmap would probably "fix"/change that.

added a pullrequest for that :)

Here's mine - http://imgur.com/a/gRiyk

This is pretty awesome, but could definitely use persistent data so we can just share the map. Could also use off-client/background processing - might be working on this piece soon...

Crashed several times, I have 250Mb of data which I think is unusually large for someone who pretty much only goes back and forth to my office and home. Either way from the screenshots looks really cool.

This is awesome. I can even see where I'm usually stuck in traffic jam and where my train to work stops every day!

I had 50MB of data, and it took at least one minute to process the JSON file.

I hope this isn't too dumb of a question but what's the best way to start collecting location history? Will it run down my iphone battery.

The Google app on the iPhone has the option of storing and reporting location history. You can enable it by Google App -> Settings (Gear icon on the top left) -> Privacy -> Location -> Location Reporting.

They claim to have optimized the app not to drain the battery life. I have been using it for over an year and I don't see an issue with my battery life.

Sweet, but you gotta make it possible to save the generated heat map somehow. It took around an hour to load my location data here.

How much data do most people have? The page seems to be struggling to process my ~83MB.

I recently (~3 weeks) got an Android phone (where I assume most of this data comes from) and I'm at 4.5MB.

I have 127MB of Location History, trying to use this takes out my browser.

It's a shame really, I bet that much data would make for some good visuals.

I have 84 MB. When I uploaded the file in Chrome I got the Frozen Tab screen for a while, but then it went away and the page started showing me processing status.

185MB. It's processing, but I fear I'll be here all night..

You should enable zip file uploading.

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