Location to heatmap

Archived

This project is archived, Google Takeout now has a better format and there are better ways to generate this representation.

Have a look at location_to_geojson.py (no dependencies needed) to generate GeoJSON files from your activities that can be loaded in QGIS or geojson.io and many other tools.

To generate raster representations like this I strongly recommend Datashader, it's powerful, easy to use and fast.

This repository is now kept only for reference.

Old readme for reference

This tool creates static and animated heatmaps of a given zone based on the data from Google location service.

It can be useful to find parts of a city that you never visited and visualize your movement and habits.

Click here to see the

Usage

You need to have the Google location service active for some time to collect the data. Use Google Takeout to export the location history.

Then, choose a city or region you are interested in and produce a background map, for example taking a screenshot of Open Street Map.

Then, create a virtualenv, install the dependencies and run the script like this (example coordinates for Berlin, Germany):

python3 -m venv .venv
python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
python3 process.py region_name 132700000 135500000 524300000 526000000 1500 /path/to/location/history/export.json /path/to/background/map/image.png

You can use python3 process.py --help to get a description, but in short the numbers you see are the decimal coordinates multiplied by 10^7, the zoom level (1000 = 1 pixel per 10 meters).

It will create a global heatmap and one for every 15 minutes span after midnight. These images are then merged in an animated GIF and a webm video using the amazing MoviePy library.

License

MIT licensed, use as you wish.

Made with ❤️ with Python and open source libraries.