In the past, I have done a few road trips through various parts of the country. This visualization is used to plot the actual routes I took in a Google Maps view.
Google Maps has a timeline feature which allows you to see your location history by year, month, and day. You can use Google Takeout to download this data in a JSON format. It doesn't seem like you can plot a route across days or weeks in the Timeline view, so I wanted to do it myself.
One of the main issues that comes up with this method of data collection is that depending on the location of the trip and the cell/GPS signal strength throughout the trip, it's possible that the data can be incomplete, noisey, or coarse in granularity. Otherwise, in general, the resulting map and route plots tend to be very clear and descriptive of the original data.
This project requires Python 3.x as well as the following packages:
This project also requires the Google Takeout JSON file of location history. This can be done creating an archive of your Google data and only selecting your location history as the archive contents. This link should directly allow you to do this. Place the JSON file at data/location_history.json in the project folder.
To sanitize the JSON location data, simply run the sanitization script:
python .\sanitize_data.py -i <raw file from Google Takeout> -o .\data\<sanitized JSON file> -s <Start Epoch Unix timestamp of data> -e <End Epoch Unix timestamp of data>
This will produce a sanitized JSON file for just the minimum data required to plot the map.
For example:
python .\sanitize_data.py -i .\data\boston_sandiego_location_history_raw.json -o .\data\boston_sandiego_location_history.json -s 1495425600000 -e 1496030340000
produces the provided file boston_sandiego_location_history.json.
To plot the map, simply run the road trip plot script:
python .\road_trip_plot.py -i .\data\<sanitized JSON file> -o .\maps\<map HTML file> -s <Start Epoch Unix timestamp of data> -e <End Epoch Unix timestamp of data>
Once the map HTML file is generated, you'll need to add a Google Maps JavaScript API key. The documentation and sample code demonstrates how to do this. Once this key is added to the URL in the map HTML file, the HTML file can be opened in any browser to view the plotted data.
An example of my road trip maps can be found below. There are more map images in the corresponding img/ directories.
