

Show HN: Generate interactive heatmaps from your Google Location History data - grepper
http://theopolisme.github.io/location-history-visualizer/

======
Kortaggio
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](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.

------
keerthiko
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.

------
grepper
I put together a little imgur album with some examples from my own Location
History: [http://imgur.com/a/qLm1Q](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!

~~~
bjornsing
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.

~~~
superphil0
added a pullrequest for that :)

------
iamryo
Here's mine - [http://imgur.com/a/gRiyk](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...

------
BorisMelnik
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.

------
flaie
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.

------
mrfusion
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.

~~~
ankushio
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.

------
kristofferR
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.

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

~~~
bvirkler
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.

------
s0rce
You should enable zip file uploading.

