Google Maps: Your personal review of the year in the timeline – location history shows all places visited

The year 2022 is slowly coming to an end and the time has begun to remember the almost past year – perhaps also with the support of the Google Maps location history. Many people or their smartphones constantly report their current location and individual movements to the Google servers, perhaps without even knowing it. We show you how to find and discover your location history.

After two years at home, 2022 is likely to have been a year for many people in which they were on the road a little more and not only commuted to work or family, but also had something to experience again. If you are slowly coming to rest and remembering, you can not only do this with smartphone photos and your own memories, but can also use Google Maps to help. Because the map platform offers the timeline on which you can find many places you have visited – unless you have manually deactivated the tracking or rejected it from the outset.

In the Google Maps timeline you will find all the places visited as well as routes and the means of transport used. This data is automatically recorded via the smartphone location that is constantly sent to the Google servers, but you can also adjust it manually. For some time now, you will not only find the raw data there, but also prepared summaries such as places visited, vacation trips or categorized places visited.

The timeline provides a number of categories for accessing this data, giving you a fairly detailed look at each individual day. If you have taken photos, they will also appear there and can therefore serve as an additional reminder. Especially at the end of the year it can be interesting to call up the places visited in 2022 again and to recall them. Because many a beautiful spring excursion needs to be remembered before the images reappear in front of the inner eye.

How to find your Google Maps timeline

1. Open the Google Maps app on your smartphone or browser
2. On your smartphone, tap on your profile picture and select “My timeline” from the menu
3. In the browser, click on the hamburger menu and select “My Timeline” from the menu
4. Here you will find all data in prepared form with location history, categorization map

I could present the timeline in detail at this point, but I’ll spare you and myself that. Just click in and take a look around, everything is self-explanatory and especially in this case it’s more fun to discover something. You can find places visited, vacation trips including stopovers, photos, categorized visits (how often did you go shopping, eating, at destinations, in hotels,…), how often did you visit a place and so on. Interesting for some users, not for others. I belong to the first group and have therefore been recording the data for many years and do not have them deleted.

I would recommend that you use both the desktop and smartphone versions. In the desktop browser, the overview is much better due to the larger map, but unfortunately many categorization functions are missing there and the interface feels like ten years ago. On the smartphone, on the other hand, you have a modern interface, but less overview.

» Google Maps: How to get to your destination faster and with less stress – Google gives five holiday tips

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