Import from Google Maps Saved Places

[tautologe]

Hi,

I would like to import my Google Maps Saved Places to Organic Maps. TL;DR: it works kind off with tokml, but titles are missing.

First I recognized that you have to use Google Takeout to get your Saved Places machine readable, it will output them as GeoJSON. This does not include Places you have saved in a custom list. They are exported as Bookmarks without any helpful metadata. So if you want to export them, you have to manually move them to the default list.

Second it seems that organic maps imports only kml files. So I had to use https://github.com/mapbox/tokml to convert my data to KML. Just install it using npm install -g tokml and then run tokml from the commandline. Importing the output file in organic maps works, but the titles are missing, every imported place has its coordinates as title.

When comparing my converted google maps export with an export from organic maps, you can actually see some differences, so it is propably a fixable problem.

But before tweaking tokml to get a better match, I wanted to ask if there is a simpler way to achieve that?
Maybe offering a direct import from google takeout's geojson in organic maps might be interesting to make the exodus from google even easier?

[biodranik]

Someone recommended this converter: http://nearby.org.uk/convert-saved-places.php
We plan to add GPX import. GeoJSON is discussable because it's not usually used for imports.

[tautologe]

Thanks for your reply!

Meanwhile I found out, that you can preserve the name/title of the locations by running tokml specifying the field name in the source data as a parameter:

tokml --name=Title takeout.json > takeout.kml

This worked for me. You can now import the takeout.kml and all the names of the locations are preserved.

[Uj947nXmRqV2nRaWshKtHzTvckUUpD]

resurecting this topic.. for a smooth transition from google maps to organic maps, there should be a clear way on how to export/import places

[thany]

It seems there are two things in the way for this to make it into some kind of feature:

1. Saved lists in Google Maps cannot be exported outright. They can only be accessed through Takeout, and they will be returned as a list of Google Places URLs, which is only partially helpful. Saved places (like starred places I think), can be accessed through an API.
2. To integrate either option into an app, it requires API access, which is going to cost the author money to implement. Google API's oftenly aren't free. And even the first X calls that are free, demand a credit card, which is just stupid. If I were the author, my response would be "fat chance, not happening".

The best thing this could result in, is documentation on how to do it manually. So feel free to write it up, I guess 🙂

[nelscity]

For those of you who are so lucky as to be Esri subscribers, I used JSON to Feature and then Layer to KML to transform the Google Takeout export to something Organic Maps could import. In Google Takeout, get both the Saved Places and Labeled Places if you have it.

[Uj947nXmRqV2nRaWshKtHzTvckUUpD]

For those of you who are so lucky as to be Esri subscribers, I used JSON to Feature and then Layer to KML to transform the Google Takeout export to something Organic Maps could import. In Google Takeout, get both the Saved Places and Labeled Places if you have it.

what do you mean by lucky?

[evanstucker-hates-2fa]

It's been a few years. We still need this feature. I would really love to stop using Google Maps, but I have hundreds of places pinned and moving them manually is not feasible.

[rudokemper]

I put together a quick webpage and script that accomplishes this:

https://github.com/rudokemper/google-maps-places-to-organic-maps

All of the Google maps metadata e.g. address, date, google_maps_url, and Comment are added to the KMZ description which Organic Maps shows for each bookmark.