The recent changes to Google’s Timeline have been nothing short of a disaster! Moving the storage of Timeline from Google’s servers to the user’s device doesn’t sound much, but it messes up a lot of things.

I can no longer view my Timeline in a browser from my iMac, I can’t download the route that we travelled each day and make maps of our travels. I can download the whole of my Timeline, but that’s 12 MB of JSON (Javascript Object Notation), and Google does not have any way to convert that into a readily-useable format such as KML.

Many hours have been spent looking for ways to generate maps of our daily travels, but no convenient solution has been found. Surely I am not the only person in the world who wants to make use of my Timeline data. My background is programming, so I am capable of writing my own code to load the Timeline JSON into a database and then display it in a browser, that’s not a trivial piece of work, it’s a route that I am reluctant to start.

Watch this space for further developments.