gotoextr

Small and dirty program to extract GPX data from Google Takeout Location History.

Hence the name: Google Takeout Location History Extractor → gotoextr.

Usage

After 2024

1. Download your location history from your phone : Settin → Location → Location Services → Time Line → Export Timeline Data.
2. Run gotoextr with the downloaded .json file as argument. For example to extract data for January 1, 2025 run:

gotoextr -s 2025-01-01 myhistory.json

Before 2024

1. Download your location history from Google Takeout as zip archive.
2. Run gotoextr with the downloaded archive as argument. For example to extract data for January 1, 2023 run:

gotoextr -s 2023-01-01 takeout-20230501T000000Z-001.zip

The output will be written to the file history_2023-01-01.gpx.

You can also manually extract Records.json and use it as parameter. Once extracted this file is quite big (several hundred MB).

Help message

$ gotoextr.exe -h
gotoextr [version: x.y.z] extract history data from Google Location History.

Usage:
  gotoextr [-h] -s <start> [options] <input>

Options:
  -h --help              Show this screen.
  -s <start>             Start date in YYYY-MM-DD format
  -e <end>               End date in YYYY-MM-DD format [default: <start>]
  -a <accuracy>          Keeps only locations with accuracy less than <accuracy> meters [default: 40]
  -t <tp>                New track if coordinates have less than <tp> digits in common [default: 1]  
  -g <sp>                New segment if coordinates have less than <sp> digits in common [default: 2]
  -f <format>            Output format (gpx|kml|tcx|csv|nmea) [default: gpx]
  -o <output>            Output file name [default: history_<start>_<end>.<format>]
  <input>                Input file name (zip or json)

Examples:
  gotoextr -s 2012-01-01 -e 2012-01-31 -a 40 takeout.zip

Installation

You can download the latest binary from the releases page.

Or you can install it from source:

go install github.com/kpym/gotoextr@latest

Why?

I use my travel history to geotag my photos. I often use a tracking application to record my positions, but occasionally (often?) I forget to launch it. In this case, Google Takeout (Location history) helps me by extracting my tracks in GPX format.

How does it work?

This program reads the location history data from a json file and extracts the data for a given date range. The json format exported from the phone is not the same as the one from Google Takeout, but the program can handle both.

For more details on the format of the json file, check the file format description.

Inspiration

This software is strongly inspired by location-history-json-converter 🙏. But since the python application is rather slow, I decided to make one in go that is about 10x faster. The original application is also more complete, I only implemented the features I needed.

License

MIT