Google killed map timeline so i have coughed a better one

As an avid traveler, the Google Maps timeline has long been one of my favorite hidden features. I’m used to opening it on slow Sunday afternoons and walking through my own travel history. It showed the alley I had forgotten, long leave that was blurred as I went out for a fast brunch over a new city, and impulsive railway trips in the last minute over Eastern Europe that never made it for pictures. It always feels like a private travel diary logging everywhere I have been.

So the announcement about Google will kill timeline views As we know, it came as a bit of a shock. The electronic timeline is no longer available and the only copy lives on your phone – unless you explicitly trigger a cloud security copy. As with all things Google, if a feature is too good, it is eventually killed (even if it is in the name of privacy). For all practical purposes, Google was about to move a year and a half Takeout Export. In other words, I could download my previous journeys or see them disappear. If I cared about these memories, it was clear that I had to find out a way to take ownership of this data. So I made it obvious: I looked up a self -costized alternative.

Even at first glance, Owntracks looked like the right tool. It is open source, it works entirely on personal infrastructure, and it stores data in pure text. The interface is reasonably polished and there is no hidden revenue generation. All this is exactly what I wanted in a Google Maps Tidy Line Replacement.

Setting it up took a weekend to cope with my synology NAS, but the payout was a location log that lives on hardware I have already paid for. I can choose what to do with this data including integration of them with Home assistantAnd I can back up that where and as often as I want. Win-win.

Get started Owntracks Is an involved process, so I started with the basics. It needs an MQTT broker to shoot messages between the phone app and the server. I installed Eclipse Mosquitto in a docker container. The documentation is clear enough about gates and volume fasteners. When the broker drove, I pointed to the property app Pixel 9 Pro To Nass Lan IP and looked at when Json packages began to appear in the logs. While I am good at syncing my place history when I am at home, you can also set up a reverse proxy and update your place in real time. Maybe a project for another time.

The second step was storage and playback. Owntracks are divided into two parts: the recorder, which is well recorded your location, and front end, which shows it. The recorder is connected to the MQTT broker we installed earlier, writes each update to the disk and exposes a HTTP API. Installing it was easy with Docker Compose, and you can also use Synology’s container manager for an even simpler setup. By default, the recorder serves a basic map on port 8083. It is not flashy, but it works. I saw my evening trip show up almost in real time. And if you just want to log your location from here and out, you can skip the front end completely. If it is important for you to import your timeline history, as it was for me, you will continue to install front end. The process is similar to installing the recorder and should not take over an hour.

Along with the Owntracks app on Android or iOS, the system also works offline. If the Internet falls or you have not set up external access, the data still lands on your NAS or Home server as soon as your phone connects to the MQTT broker.

It must be said that Google does not make it easy to import your old site data. After running exports through Google TakeoutImporting my old data took quite a bit of quarrel. Takeout gave me a folder with Json files, and it took a community script to convert them to the format the recorder expects. When that was done, I led on a decade value of travel over to Owntracks, restarted the service and watched it quietly put everything into the database. It was not friction -free, but when it worked, it felt like going back to Google’s old timeline view, except this time, everything was confidence.

Despite the effort involved in setting up your own tracks, the end result makes it worth it. The process taught me all the variables that are about getting the service started and reminded me why self -esteeming feels liberating. If I ever need to troubleshoot things, it should be quite trivial and every solution is more or less final. I can choose to never update the service before a major release. More specifically, Google cannot mark my NAS as depreciated. As you have realized now, a feature is in itself. In addition, if I want to fine -tune something, I can read the source code and add it.

When you get to the experience of using Owntracks, it is, predictable, not as full function as a product of Google. All you get is a map with place markers showing where you have been. Since the service utilizes OpenStreetMaps, the data is not the same full function. So this may not be the best option if you are trying to find an old restaurant you visited a decade ago, or expect additions as a street view to go back in your own steps.

But for all limitations, Owntracks do a good job of helping you visualize where you were at a particular time. Depending on your needs, it may be enough. Although Owntracks do not offer heatmaps or trip labels, it offers somewhat more important: Duration. The data is in JSON files, nicely organized by year and month. Any mapping library can read it. If I want a heat map, I can generate one with python in five minutes. There is a lot of flexibility here.

Of course, privacy is the second most obvious victory. Nothing leaves my network unless I push it. The recorder supports end-to-end encryption with a pre-shared key, so even though I sync data between websites, the RAW coordinates remain protected. No analyzes. No third party servers unless I choose to use them. Since the service is quite easy, hardware requirements have also been modest. You can drive this on an extra Raspberry pi If you choose to. MQTT and the recorder use less than one percent CPU on a five -year -old NAS. Frontend is just Nginx serving static files. A whole year of movement data, logged at ten seconds of intervals, weighs in just a few hundred megabytes. It is a very small footprint, all taken into account. I also have layers of further convenience for more security. For example, the location data is backed up nocturnal not only to another NAS, but also to – ironically – Google.

Can a less technically inclined friend recreate this? Probably, if they are comfortable using Docker composition and a terminal. Owntracks are not plug-and-play, butevels in society help to fill in the gaps. There are guides for synology, unraid, Raspberry Pi and Plain Linux. And the tool is improved every year. But I kidding if I said it was easy. In an ideal world, we should not have to do a service like this. But with Google’s ham-fisted approach to beloved services, it’s probably for the best.

I do not claim that Owntracks are perfect. The mobile app sometimes ends up publishing when Android’s battery manager becomes too aggressive. The map guide lacks search. Importing large datasets can freeze the user interface until the treatment is completed. But these are trade -offs I can live with. Nor are they serious enough to prevent use. All that said, the place story feels trivial until you lose it. Sometimes the only plate of a detour or a missing turn that led you to a cool place a dot on a map. That dot can jog a memory or just remind you that you covered a lot of reason that year. Now that DOT lives permanently on my NAS. If Google brings the timeline back tomorrow, I would still stick to Owntracks because of that duration.