Google gives you the opportunity to download your data via Google Takeout. But if you're moving accounts (e.g. from a free Google account to a paid Google account) there's no data importer for Google Maps (at least to my knowledge). On top of this the Google Maps API is rather simple to non-existent when it comes to importing data, this means in order to get your saved places (the ⭐ you can set) back, you need to manually import them. This can get quite cumbersome if you have a lot of saved places. I wrote this script in order to help me batch import places I want to save, may it be from a previous backup or new ones. It's highly experimental and if you want to use it please use it at your own risk! I recently added an interactive mode because I was getting tired of clicking on the Web UI.
You will need to have Firefox installed and logged in to your Google account. Then you need the marionette_driver package which you can install via pip with pip install marionette_driver. Afterwards start your Firefox with firefox -marionette so that it can be controlled. Alternatively you can set marionette.enabled to true in about:config. If you don't want to temper with your system create a virtual environment using:
$ virtualenv --version # Check virtual environment is installed
$ virtualenv venv --python=python2.7 # Create a virtual environment
$ source venv/bin/activate # Activate it...
$ pip install -r requirements.txt # Install the requirements
$ deactivate # Deactivate after you're done
Also make sure you have a file called gm-api-key.json in your root directory if you want to use the interactive mode. The file contains your Google Maps API key in the form of {"key": "<your key here>"}.
$ python2.7 spi.py --help
usage: spi.py [-h] {batch,interactive} ...
Saved Places Importer
positional arguments:
{batch,interactive}
batch Batch mode, via import files
interactive Interactive mode, via menu
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
Examples:
$ python2.7 spi.py interactive # Interactive mode
$ python2.7 spi.py batch samples/sample-geo.json --dry-run # Batch mode, import GeoJSON, only simulate
$ python2.7 spi.py batch samples/sample-geo.json --compare # Batch mode, import GeoJSON, only compare
$ python2.7 spi.py batch samples/sample-geo.json # Batch mode, import GeoJSON
- Combine common code from
interactive_loop_add_*. - Redesign entire application, especially sub-command structure.
- Add wait/throttling between requests.
- Reverse engineer actual API calls made by Google Maps to avoid Marionette?
- No Python 3 support, Marionette is not compatible yet.