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I find the location history feature in Google Maps immensely valuable. Is there any way to run a similar self-hosted feature? I'd love to import my existing tim

by hughes 6y ago

I find the location history feature in Google Maps immensely valuable. Is there any way to run a similar self-hosted feature? I'd love to import my existing timeline if possible.

cromka 6y ago
Ditto. I think it would be great if one could use Google and set to autodelete after 3 months, but still periodically download and import the history to a private instance of a similar service. Same goes for the Search History.
danans 6y ago
In theory you could just: - Write your own mobile app that has access to fine grained location, logs it, and periodically uploads the location trace to your own server. - Download the traces from your server and convert them to an appropriate format. - Upload the traces to Google MyMaps - or use a map rendering engine you control if avoiding 3rd party online services is a goal - for visualization By doing this you give up additional features provided by Google Location history - things like semantic place detections (i.e you were at airport X or mall Y) trace error correction, auto-segmentation of traces, etc. But if all you care about is a seeing a trace on a map, then that should work. This general approach is already widely used by software that has an external location logging system (i.e. wildlife tracking transmitters, commercial vehicle fleet tracking) but need to visualize/track those on a map. Disclosure: Google employee but not currently working on Maps.
Ao7bei3s 6y ago
At least the data collection part is very easy to set up on Android and zero maintenance afterwards: Use GPSLogger[1] to record the position. It can auto-upload to pretty much anything from DropBox to SFTP (FTP over SSH). It can auto-start on boot, run in background, and rotate files daily. (If you do SFTP, use ForceCommand internal-sftp in sshd_config to restrict the phone to file transfers.) No excessive energy usage. Use GPSMapper[2] to visualize the GPX files on phone, or https://www.gpxsee.org/ https://www.gpxsee.org/ on Linux (this tool works well even with hundreds of GPX files loaded, unlike all others I've tried). None of the viewers are really "nice" unfortunately. If someone needs a side project idea, a personal location history visualizer would be nice. All existing tools focus on individual tracks (eg day hikes), there's nothing that does much useful when you dump a few years worth of history into it. Actually most just freeze or crash. But there's so much that could be done (performance, filtering by time, exporting/sharing specific parts, postprocessing like removing outliers, correcting cut corners by matching against a map, detecting places/businesses and hyperlinking to services like AllTrails, visualizations like speed over time (this part is common) but auto-detecting and showing this for all traces along the same route (no software does this yet) (think "how fast was I on which part of my commute each day over the past year"), multi user eg. family capability, etc.) Of course even if viewers are limited today, one can still collect the data in case someone writes a better viewer tomorrow ;-) Google Takeout can export raw location history, and there are tools to convert that standard GPX. Only issue I have with GPSLogger is that the accuracy filter is not adaptive. At a high value, you'll get outliers, at a low value, it won't record during flights. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gpslogger&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gp... [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gpsvisualizer&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gp...
efreak 6y ago
There are multiple apps on Fdroid that log your location. Most of them are designed as fitness/walk trackers, but there's at least one that reports to a self-hosted server.

by hughes 6y ago

I find the location history feature in Google Maps immensely valuable. Is there any way to run a similar self-hosted feature? I'd love to import my existing timeline if possible.

cromka 6y ago

Ditto. I think it would be great if one could use Google and set to autodelete after 3 months, but still periodically download and import the history to a private instance of a similar service. Same goes for the Search History.

danans 6y ago

In theory you could just: - Write your own mobile app that has access to fine grained location, logs it, and periodically uploads the location trace to your own server. - Download the traces from your server and convert them to an appropriate format. - Upload the traces to Google MyMaps - or use a map rendering engine you control if avoiding 3rd party online services is a goal - for visualization By doing this you give up additional features provided by Google Location history - things like semantic place detections (i.e you were at airport X or mall Y) trace error correction, auto-segmentation of traces, etc. But if all you care about is a seeing a trace on a map, then that should work. This general approach is already widely used by software that has an external location logging system (i.e. wildlife tracking transmitters, commercial vehicle fleet tracking) but need to visualize/track those on a map. Disclosure: Google employee but not currently working on Maps.

Ao7bei3s 6y ago

At least the data collection part is very easy to set up on Android and zero maintenance afterwards: Use GPSLogger[1] to record the position. It can auto-upload to pretty much anything from DropBox to SFTP (FTP over SSH). It can auto-start on boot, run in background, and rotate files daily. (If you do SFTP, use ForceCommand internal-sftp in sshd_config to restrict the phone to file transfers.) No excessive energy usage. Use GPSMapper[2] to visualize the GPX files on phone, or https://www.gpxsee.org/ https://www.gpxsee.org/ on Linux (this tool works well even with hundreds of GPX files loaded, unlike all others I've tried). None of the viewers are really "nice" unfortunately. If someone needs a side project idea, a personal location history visualizer would be nice. All existing tools focus on individual tracks (eg day hikes), there's nothing that does much useful when you dump a few years worth of history into it. Actually most just freeze or crash. But there's so much that could be done (performance, filtering by time, exporting/sharing specific parts, postprocessing like removing outliers, correcting cut corners by matching against a map, detecting places/businesses and hyperlinking to services like AllTrails, visualizations like speed over time (this part is common) but auto-detecting and showing this for all traces along the same route (no software does this yet) (think "how fast was I on which part of my commute each day over the past year"), multi user eg. family capability, etc.) Of course even if viewers are limited today, one can still collect the data in case someone writes a better viewer tomorrow ;-) Google Takeout can export raw location history, and there are tools to convert that standard GPX. Only issue I have with GPSLogger is that the accuracy filter is not adaptive. At a high value, you'll get outliers, at a low value, it won't record during flights. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gpslogger&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gp... [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gpsvisualizer&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gp...

efreak 6y ago

There are multiple apps on Fdroid that log your location. Most of them are designed as fitness/walk trackers, but there's at least one that reports to a self-hosted server.