Get your saved places out of Google Maps

Saved places accumulate for years and then turn out to be difficult to get at. The lists are easy to add to, easy to browse on a phone, and awkward to do anything else with: you cannot sort them, filter them, share them as a table or plot them anywhere other than where they already are.

Google Takeout is the way out, and it is worth knowing about for more than this. It is the export mechanism that exists because of data protection law, specifically the right to data portability, which requires that data you provided is available in a structured, commonly used, machine readable format. Takeout is Google's implementation of that right, and most large services have an equivalent whether or not it is advertised.

What comes out is not friendly. Takeout produces a large archive of files in formats chosen for completeness rather than for use, and saved places in particular arrive in a shape that is technically correct and practically unreadable. Turning it into a spreadsheet is the step between having your data and being able to use it.

The formats are worth choosing between rather than defaulting. CSV or Excel for anything you want to sort, filter or annotate, which covers most planning. GeoJSON if the destination is a map, because it keeps the coordinates as coordinates rather than as two columns of numbers that something later has to interpret.

The thing to be aware of before this leaves your machine is what a list of saved places actually is. It is a record of where you have been and where you intend to go, often including home, work, and the places you visit regularly. That is among the more sensitive things a person holds about themselves, which is precisely why an export tool for it should not be a website that receives the file.

So this one does not. The archive is read in the page, the conversion happens locally, and nothing is transmitted. Which for a file whose contents are a map of your life is the only arrangement that makes sense.