Location history without Google Maps Timeline

"Where was I in March?" used to have one answer on Android: open Google Maps, tap Timeline. Two things changed. Timeline is off unless you opted in, and since 2024 it lives only on the phone — no website, no account view, and it disappears with the device unless you export it. So a lot of people who go looking find nothing. Here is what you can do in both cases.

Case 1: you never turned Timeline on

You still have a location history — it is in your photos. Every photo taken with location tags on carries coordinates and a timestamp. Read those from your gallery and sort by time, and you get a route with gaps where you did not shoot. For most people that is enough to answer "where was I" for any trip they cared about, because trips are exactly when people take photos.

What you will not get from photos: commutes, drives, and days you did not photograph. What you will get: the places that mattered, with dates. An app like Tripline reads the tags on the phone (never uploading the pictures), removes duplicates and mis-tagged jumps, names the cities from an offline list, and draws the route — or renders it as a video.

If your photos have no location at all, the camera setting is off. Fix it going forward: turn on camera location tags.

Case 2: you have Timeline — export it

On Android the export lives in the phone's Settings, not inside the Maps app:

1. Open Settings on the phone.
2. Location → Location services → Timeline (on some phones: Location → Google Location History).
3. Tap Export Timeline data, then Continue.
4. Save Timeline.json somewhere easy, such as Downloads.

The file is plain JSON. Newer exports are a flat list of segments; older ones are wrapped in semanticSegments. Positions come as geo:lat,lng strings, as separate lat/lng fields, or as E7 integers depending on the version. A good importer accepts all of them.

Best of both: merge photos and Timeline

Photos tell you where the interesting things happened; Timeline tells you how you got there. Merged and sorted by time, you get a complete route: the drive to the airport from Timeline, the four days in the city from photos, the flight home as an arc between them. Tripline imports Timeline.json from Settings, thins it to one point per minute, and merges it into the same route it builds from photos. The JSON stays on the phone.

Privacy note

Location history is sensitive. Whatever tool you use, check two things: that it does not upload the file or the photos, and that the only network traffic is map tiles. Tripline's privacy page lists exactly what leaves the device — map tile requests for the areas drawn, and nothing else.