How to View and Manage Your Location History in Google Maps

While Google Maps helps you find new places and find the best routes, it also saves these items in your location history. You can use the Timeline feature on Google Maps to track every place you’ve visited. However, you may want to delete some visits from your history.

Of all the cool tricks that Google Maps has up its sleeve, Timeline has to be the most useful. It can help you easily retrace your steps. Whether it’s the name of the gift shop you visited last month or the photos you took on your last trip, Timeline can help you relive all those memories.

Let’s see how you can view, edit, or delete your location history in Google Maps.

The Google Maps app works pretty much the same on Android and iOS. So, for this article, I am using an Android device.

How to view location history on Google Maps

To view your travel history for a particular day, week or month, follow the steps mentioned below.

Step 1: Open the Google Maps app on your phone and tap the circle for your account in the top right corner. Then select the Your Timeline option from the list.

2nd step: Swipe down on the lower half of the screen to view detailed information about each trip, including location, distance traveled, trip time, and mode of transportation. If there is incorrect or missing information, Google Maps also allows you to edit or remove the route from your timeline.

With the Timeline feature, you can also view your location history for a particular day by selecting a date from the calendar at the top.

Moreover, it also keeps a list of all kinds of places, cities and countries visited throughout your history.

How to turn off location history on Google Maps

While the Timeline feature can be handy in some situations, the idea of ​​Google following your location can be scary for some. Fortunately, you can turn off the timeline feature in a few easy steps.

Step 1: Open the Google Maps app on your phone and tap the circle for your account in the top right corner. Then select the Your Timeline option from the list.

2nd step: Now click on the three dot menu icon in the top right corner and go to ‘Settings & Privacy’. Swipe down to location settings, then tap “Location history is on.”

Step 3: In the Activity Controls window, turn off the Location History button. Then the app notifies you of what will work and what will not work when disabled. Finally, click on the Pause button to turn off location history.

To note: Turning off the timeline feature does not remove Google’s access to your location data as long as you use it for navigation and Google searches.

If you’re concerned about recording your activity on the map, Google Maps also has an incognito mode, just like Google Chrome and YouTube do.

How to delete location history on Google Maps

If you don’t intend to use your old location data, Google Maps also offers an option to delete it. Here’s how to do it.

Step 1: Open the Google Maps app on your phone and tap the circle for your account in the top right corner. Then select the Your Timeline option from the list.

2nd step: Click on the three-dot menu icon in the upper right corner and navigate to ‘Settings & Privacy’.

Step 3: To delete the entire location history, press “Delete all location history”. After that, check the box “I understand and want to delete” and hit the delete button.

You can also choose to delete the location history for a specific period by tapping “Remove range from location history” and entering the start and end date.

In addition to that, you can also set up an auto delete feature to delete history periodically by selecting “ Auto delete location history ”.

Bonus: How to Create a Heat Map with Google Location History

By combining your location history with third-party APIs and tools, you can create your own heat map of all the places visited on a trip. Here’s how.

Step 1: Go to Google Takeout to download your location data. Under “Select the data to include”, click Deselect All. Now scroll down and check the box that says Location History and click on Next Step.

Visit Google Takeout

2nd step: Choose the delivery method, file type and size, and frequency, then click Create Export. Once the export is created, click on the download button and a zipped file will be downloaded to your device.

To note: The download process may take a while depending on the size of your Google Maps data.

Step 3: Now unzip the downloaded file and open the Location History folder inside.

Step 4: Go to the heatmap feature on the Location History Viewer and download the LocationHistory.json file.

Visit the location history viewer

And There you go. Your own heat map from your location data. You can navigate the heat map like Google Maps and take screenshots of it.

A trip to the past

You can revisit old memories by viewing your location history and also useful for passing the same route on to friends and others. If you don’t want to leave a track on Google Maps, you can also delete these routes. Let us know how you plan to use the Timeline feature in the comments below.