Mapping our ways

While some folk may find this intrusive I love the monthly Timeline update I receive from Google that tells me where I have been in the preceeding month.

My February Travel Map

I receive this  "because I turned on Location History, a Google Account-level setting that creates Timeline, a personal map of my visited places, routes and trips."  In a nod to security I have this data set so that only I can access it. 

While it may miss those rare journeys I take without my mobile phone the app keeps a record of most of the places I have visited in Australia since 2013 and internationally since 2017. My all-time data report does not therefore list all the places in countries like India, Tibet and Egypt that I have been!

Some of the places I have visited since 2013

I try to label all my photos each night when travelling but sometimes I can't remember the spelling or correct names of particular sites, Google plots these for me so I can apply accurate labels later. It also helps when I am trying to date some random photos. I also use this data as a reference to update my Google travel map.

Being able to look at a map of places I have been for each day since 2013 is a great way to reminiscence and, for a blogger, provides many ideas for stories. 

Following is a map of our recent pre-cruise day when we hired a car in Tahiti and drove as far as we could around the perimeter of the island. These maps can be expanded to show fine detail.

A Day's driving in Tahiti

Mapping our way

Mr GeniAus and I love to travel.

For some time now I have recorded the places we have visited on TripAdvisor's Travel Map. Recently a number of fellow mappers have commented on the stability of this Tripadvisor feature. Not wanting to lose the list of places I'd been I investigated how to download my map data. I found the information on how to do this here: https://download-your-travelmap.christianhaller.com/

I was able to download the map in two formats, a .csv file (I knew what that was and how to open that) and a .kml file that I knew nothing about. After downloading the two files I spent some time learning about .kml files and how to open them. I was able to import the .kml file into Google Earth and display it there.

As I'm more familiar with Google Maps and My Maps I investigated how to view the data on that site. All I had to do was create a new My Map and import my .kml data. That was easy. Once I made the map public I was able to select Embed on my site from the Share options for my map.

I created a new static page for my blog and then I pasted the few lines of code into my page using the .html input option and the map appeared.

As I feel that Google Maps will be more reliable than the Travel Map feature on Tripadvisor I will now update my list of places visited on my new Google GeniAus Travel map.

You can view my map here on my new page.