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I have hundreds of locations starred in Google Maps. I'd like to export the list of them so that I can import them into other software, like Google Earth or map applications on my Android phone. Is there any way to do this other than manually clicking on them one-by-one?

If there's no official way, is there a workaround? Google Maps for Android can access the starred locations, so maybe there's a way to rip them out of its database files? Maybe some other software that can access it?

This is very similar, but I am asking about Starred locations, they aren't in My Maps.

They recently changed it so that starred locations are listed along with other locations under "My Places", but I still don't see a way to export.

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    Currently there is no way to export Starred items in one batch. – Dmitry Selitskiy Jun 23 '11 at 6:27
  • @Dmitry: Is there a way to export them one by one? I could write a Python script to automate it? – endolith Jun 23 '11 at 15:47
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    I cannot find a reliable way to do them individually either – Dmitry Selitskiy Jun 23 '11 at 22:17
  • They all appear in Google Bookmarks, but only as URLs with cid numbers like https://maps.google.com/?cid=4350987349087335054, and they're mixed in with all other bookmarks, but maybe a script could step through and follow each link and extract the name and coordinates? – endolith Oct 14 '12 at 4:41
  • @endolith: And the coordinates do appear in the page's source 3 times: ...,overlays:{sxcar:true,markers:[{id:'A',cid:'4350987349087335054',latlng:{lat:40.729879,lng:-73.991094}... – endolith Oct 14 '12 at 4:59
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Well, after discovering that the starred locations are also mirrored on Google Bookmarks, I wrote a Python script to scrape the coordinates and generate a KML file:

Export Google Maps starred locations

  1. Go to Google Bookmarks: https://www.google.com/bookmarks/
  2. On the bottom left, click "Export bookmarks": https://www.google.com/bookmarks/bookmarks.html?hl=en
  3. After downloading the html file, run this script on it to generate a KML.

It's hacky and doesn't read all of them correctly, but the ones it fails on tend to be ones that don't even open correctly if you click on the link in Google Bookmarks.

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    Very nice! Tried this on a file that has Umlauts in it, where it does not work. Example: UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xdf' in position 29: ordinal not in range(128) My Python is non-existent, but if you could make your script work with this bookmarks file it would be awesome. – myhd Dec 13 '12 at 12:37
  • @myhd: Oops. I will try to fix it. – endolith Dec 13 '12 at 17:48
  • @myhd: sorry I didn't fix this. it works fine for me. maybe it's just a difference in your terminal character set, and you can fix it just by removing all the print statements? stackoverflow.com/q/5695421/125507 – endolith Apr 17 '13 at 15:11
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Seeing that there's no convenient way of doing this provided by Google, I've created a tiny online app for export of your starred locations: http://gexport.somee.com/

It's very primitive, but it does the job. (credits to endolith for the idea of implementation)

UPDATE: this app is no longer relevant, you can use Google Takeout to export your bookmarks as GeoJSON. Then you can use this site to convert it to KML or GPX.

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  • Much easier than the above solutions, although they surely work. – Doggie52 Sep 11 '14 at 12:26
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    This webapp no longer works, possibly because it is hitting Google Maps on an HTTP URL. However it is now possible to export saved places via Google Takeout in GeoJSON format. – jamiecon Mar 12 '17 at 14:30
  • Thank you Jamie, I've updated the app and answer to point to Google Takeout instead. – Al Z Mar 23 '17 at 10:31
  • This fails to label the places in the KML. Is there a better approach (now). – orome May 23 '17 at 17:42
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Google Takeout site has info how to move your data in and out of Google products.

In the case of Maps, you can export your saved places in GeoJSON format, which is then easily convertible to KML.

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  • Sorry, that doesn't help – endolith Jul 30 '11 at 4:04
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    Actually it's way better this way, as you can download your saved places as geojson with all attributes. – meaku Dec 11 '16 at 14:27
  • This doesn't label the places in the Google Map (though the data is there in the GeoJSON as "Title"). Is there a way to ensure that the title ends up as the label for the location in the KML? – orome May 23 '17 at 17:44
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Easiest process was to go to Google Bookmarks, copy each of the starred items, and paste it to a note or Word doc. Log out of the Google account and log into the new Google account. Go to Google Maps. Paste each link from your doc into Google maps one by one and star each item as you go. Took me 5 minutes to do the 20 or so that I had. Very easy.

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    I have hundreds of starred locations, so anything that requires manual copypasting is no good. :) – endolith Dec 10 '12 at 16:33
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I figured out a way to export your starred locations.

  1. Go to your account settings
  2. Click on the section titled "Data Tools"
  3. Click Select data to download
  4. "Create an Archive"
  5. Check "Bookmarks"
  6. "Create Archive"

Download and you're done! You'll get an HTML file with all the locations as addresses that are linked to the Google Maps.

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    that's what I did in my answer, and wrote a python script to grab the locations and convert it back into KML – endolith Apr 18 '14 at 21:44
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Takout

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  1. Export from Google using: https://www.google.com/bookmarks/
  2. Then convert to KML or other format using this website: http://gexport.somee.com/
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Export all the bookmarks... Log out of the account.

Log into the account you want to add these bookmarks to.

Click on the GoogleBookmarks.html

Now click on each bookmark listed. Google will take you to that page. Click on the Star. Click back.

Do this for each.

Enjoy

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  • Sorry, but can you provide screenshots and more details so that the asker can better understand? Thank you! – Hydra Apr 17 '13 at 15:01

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