Import Places from Google Maps

Aug 20, 2024

New in Scoria 1.4.2 is the ability to import places from a GeoJSON file. This lets you migrate over places that you've saved in other apps.

If you export your saved places from Google Maps, your starred places will be in a GeoJSON format and can be directly importing into Scoria.

However, all other lists are exported in CSV format, and lack the place coordinates. To import these places, you'll need a way to get the coordinates for each place, and turn the CSV into a GeoJSON.

We've created a tool for doing just this. It looks up the coordinates for each place using the Google Maps URL, converting a CSV into a GeoJSON with the location data. It can also fix up GeoJSON files, since some places might lack coordinates even though they're in the GeoJSON.

How-to

Once you've exported your data, you'll have one Saved Places.json for your starred places and a collection of .csv files for all of your other lists. You'll want to run gmaps-coords on each file, including the GeoJSON, to ensure each place has coordinate data.

First, install Rust.

Next, install the gmaps-coords CLI tool, and a WebDriver server like geckodriver. The WebDriver server lets gmaps-coords visit the Google Maps webpage and retrieve each place's coordinates.

cargo install --git https://github.com/scoria-team/gmaps-coords.git
cargo install geckodriver

In one terminal, start geckodriver.

geckodriver

In a second terminal, run gmaps-coords on your files. The tool takes about two seconds to look up each place's coordinates.

gmaps-coords -i saved_places.json -o saved_places_complete.json
gmaps-coords -i travel_list.csv -o travel_list_coords.json

Parallelism

Multiple instances of the tool can be run at the same time using multiple WebDriver instances. Specify the -p argument for geckodriver and gmaps-coords to a value other than the default 4444.

geckodriver -p 4445
gmaps-coords -p 4445 -i saved_places.json -o out.json

More Options

gmaps-coords --help