If you change the way you save maps, you’ll have to download the map again. On your Android phone or tablet, open the Google Maps app. Make sure you're connected to the internet and signed in to Google Maps. Search for a place, like San Francisco. At the bottom, tap the name or address of the place Download Download. May 17, 2017 Android: Use offline areas After you download an area, use the Google Maps app just like you normally would. Get directions and see routes. Use navigation. Search for locations If your Internet connection is slow or absent, you’ll see a lightning bolt and Google Maps will use your offline areas to give you directions.
If you are someone who uses Google Maps on a smartphone as their primary GPS device, you probably have Location History enabled in your Google account. Whether this is a useful feature or another over-the-top tracking feature, depends on your level of privacy safeguarding.
I personally don’t mind Google tracking my location because I find the benefits outweigh the negatives. In any case, if Location History is enabled, you can use Google Maps to view your exact travel paths for any day on a map, which is pretty cool.
In this article, I’ll talk about how you can view this history and also how to check if you have Location History enabled or disabled. If you just want to learn how to view the timeline, skip down to the View Maps Timeline section.
Turn Location History On/Off
Depending on your device, there are several ways to turn on or turn off location history for a device. Note that each device you own can have location history enabled or disabled. So if you have Google Maps installed on an Android device, an iPhone and a tablet, each device will record location history and it’ll be combined when you view it using the timeline.
Desktop/Laptop
If you’re using a laptop or desktop computer, the easiest way to change these settings is to go to Google Activity Controls.
Scroll down until you see Location History and you can click on the toggle button to enable or disable it. Note that doing it here will enable/disable location history for your entire account, regardless of which devices had location history enabled.
Just FYI, this screen also lets you control a whole lot of other settings like YouTube search and watch history, voice and audio history, web and app activity and device information.
Android
On Android devices, you have to go to the Settings app. Tap on the all apps icon at the center and then tap on Settings.
Scroll down until you get to the Personal section and the first item should be Location. You might see something like ON / High accuracy if you have it enabled.
Tap on this and you’ll now be able to turn off location history for this particular device. If you notice, there is another option called Google Location History.
If you tap on this option, you’ll see a list of all your enabled devices and you can disable location history for the entire account.
iPhone
On the iPhone, there are a couple of ways to go about changing this setting. The first and easiest way is to simply open Google Maps and then tap on the hamburger icon at the very top left.
Then tap on Settings towards the bottom of the menu. Scroll down to Location History and tap on that.
You can now change the setting here for just the device or for the whole account. If you have the Google search app installed on your phone, you can go there, tap on your email at the top left, then tap on Privacy, and then on Location.
Here you can manage Location History and Location Reporting, which are two different features.
View Google Maps Timeline
OK, so now for the actual fun part! To view your timeline, simply visit the maps timeline link. The main screen will give you an overview of your location history.
The first thing you’ll notice is the large map in the center with a bunch of red dots. Each one of these drops corresponds to a trip you have made. If you double-click on the red dot, you’ll be brought to that specific time period and you’ll see the route traveled.
In the above example, I was travelling from New Orleans to Gadsden, AL on September 11th, 2014. This was our trip back from my parents’ home to our home in Maryland. We stopped one night in Alabama along the way.
Across the bottom, you can click on any specific day to see your daily travels. The individual days are really cool because if you happened to have taken photos and you saved them using Google Photos, they will show up in the timeline too.
As you can see, we walked around the lake area during this day and we took some pictures at the lake, which show up in the left-hand side. It’s pretty cool! It even tells you how far you walked and for how long!
If you go back to the main screen, you can also click the two big icons at the bottom. One will say something like X Places, See your most visited places and the other will say More Trips. This is a quick way to see the most common places you go to and to quickly see all your major trips/travels.
Overall, it’s really cool if you don’t mind the fact that Google knows where you are all the time. If you can live with that, you can see some pretty cool information about yourself. It’s worth noting that you can delete your location history any time you want. Also, check out my article on how to view your Google Maps search history. Enjoy!
By now, most people should be aware that their smartphone constantly tracks and sends away location data and shares them with third party apps. Of course, this can be avoided by turning location sharing off but this would make many apps that need your current location rather useless – think Foursquare, Google Maps or any other navigation or travel app.
That’s probably reason enough for most people to share their location. But do you know how often your phone shares its location with, for example, Google? Well, it’s doing that quite a lot.
For example, a few days ago, I had a couple of drinks in two bars in Berlin and my phone tracked and sent my current location 300 (!) times to Google. Especially while I was going from one place to another, my location was sent to Google about every minute. For most people that number is probably surprising, if not shocking.
Google Maps Timeline shows your past location history in much detail
Back in July 2015, Google completely overhauled its Location History tool and changed its name to “Your Timeline“. It comes with a much more up-to-date design and improved user experience. Google wants you to use Your Timeline to “easily remember all the places you’ve been — whether it’s a museum you visited during your last vacation or that fun bar you stumbled upon a few months ago” (or all the bars you went to on last night’s bar crawl).
Just imagine yourself dragging along a brush with blue paint behind you at all times, painting a line behind you. That’s basically what Google shows you in your timeline’s map.
The cool thing is, it doesn’t only show your location history on a map, it also shows you the exact places you visited. Surprisingly, Google is doing that quite accurately and once it’s not so sure, it gives you the option to confirm a suggested place. The gimmick I like the most is that your timeline also shows the images you took at a known location. For example, in the image below you see images I took of the hotel I stayed at in the Netherlands.
Besides knowing to which places you went, Google also detects, if you travelled by train or by plane and displays that information in your map.
How to see if you have Location History enabled
If you’re not sure whether you enabled location history or not (many don’t), just head to your personal Google Location History timeline. On the bottom, you should see a card saying if Location History is on or off.
Google integrated Your Timeline into the last Google Maps app update, which means that you can access all your stored location history easily on your phone. If you open up Google Maps and swipe in the left sidebar, you should see “Your timeline” as the second option below “Your places”.
Inside your timeline, you can select the dates you’re interested in and see all the places you went to, how you got to them and how long you stayed there. In case you feel the need to delete the location history of a specific day, you can do that by selecting the three-dotted icon and then “Delete day”. You can also select individual locations in the your timeline to change the reported place or remove that stop from your day without deleting all the others.
How to turn off or delete your Google location history data
Having all the places you went to in the past weeks, months or even years all in one place can be very handy. However, you shouldn’t forget that you don’t have all that data saved locally on your computer. It’s up in the cloud and all of it lies on Google’s servers.
Thankfully, Google makes it quite easy for you to turn off location history or delete it completely. If you want to delete all location data, select the cogwheel icon in the bottom right corner inside the Timeline interface and select ‘Delete all location history’.
To turn off location history, check the steps below for both Android and iOS.
Android
- Depending on your device you either need to open the Google Settings app or select the ‘Google’ settings within your main phone settings menu.
- Select ‘Location’.
- Select ‘Google Location History’ at the bottom.
- Now you can either turn it off for your whole Google account or just for one of the listed devices.
iOS
- Open up the Google app on your iOS device.
- Select Settings > Privacy > Location and then Location History.
- To turn it off, select ‘Do not store’.
[Outdated] Google’s Location History lets you see where you have been in the last months
All the location data an Android phone sends to Google is stored online and can be accessed on Google’s Location History page. Of course, you can only access your stored locations if you’re logged in with your Google account. What’s interesting, but also a bit frightening, is that you can see your location history from many months ago. I, for example, can go back as far as December 10th, 2012 and see where I was that day.
Until the end of last year you were also able to see a dashboard with many useful data of your whereabouts such as how many hours you spent at work, home or going out. However, Google decided to take down the location dashboard, probably because not as many people used the service as they hoped for.
Downloading Google Maps For Android For Trip History App
Last words
Google Maps’ timeline (old Location History) definitely shows that Google is accessing your location in a much more invasive way than most people think. In case you don’t want your location to be stored online, you can disable location history in the settings. Open up Google Maps on your phone, go to your timeline and select the three-dotted icon and then “Manage location settings”. Now, select Google location settings and turn off Location History for your account.
Personally, I think it’s convenient to be able to see where you were the last days or months. If you want to review your road trip or just try to puzzle together how last night went down, your Google Maps timeline is your friend!
Google Maps For Android Offline
Are you worried about your location data being stored online or are you, like me, embracing Google’s services? Let me know in the comments!