Google killed the chronology cards, so I have self-hosted a better

As a passionate traveler, Google Maps Timeline has long been one of my favorite hidden features. I used to open it slow Sunday afternoon and walk around my own travel story. He showed alleys that I had forgotten, long steep steps that scrambled together while leaving for a quick brunch in a new city, and last -minute impulsive rail trips across Eastern Europe that have never taken photos. It has always felt a private travel journal that disconnects wherever I am.

Thus, the announcement that Google will kill Timeline’s view because we know it as a little shock. The view of online chronology is no longer accessible, and the only copy lives on your phone – unless you explicitly trigger a cloud backup. As with everything related to Google, if a feature is too good, it ends up being killed (even if it is in the name of privacy). For all practical purposes, Google was about to move a decade and a half of my location history behind an export to take away. In other words, I could download my past trips or watch them disappear. If I cared about these memories, it was clear that I had to find a way to appropriate this data. So I made the evidence: I looked for a self-heberged alternative.

Even at first glance, the owners looked like the right tool. It is open source, it works entirely on personal infrastructure, and it stores the data in raw text. The interface is reasonably polished and there is no hidden monetization. All this is exactly what I wanted in a replacement of the chronology of Google Maps.

The Configure took a DIY weekend on my NAS Synology, but the gain was a location journal that lives on the equipment I have already paid. I can choose what to do with this data, including integrating it into Home Assistant, and I can save it everywhere and as often as I wish. Win-win.

Start with Owners is an involved process, so I started with the basics. He needs an MQTT broker to harm messages between the telephone application and the server. I installed Eclipse Mosquitto in a Docker container. The documentation is clear enough on ports and volume supports. Once the broker is running, I pointed out the Owntracks application on my Pixel 9 Pro at the NAS LAN and I watched the JSON packages start to appear in the newspapers. Although I agree to synchronize my location history whenever I am back home, you can also configure an inverted proxy and update your location in real time. Perhaps a project for another time.

The second step was storage and reading. Owntracks is divided into two parts: the recorder, which, well, records your location, and the frontend, which displays it. The recorder connects to the MQTT broker that we installed earlier, writes each update on the disk and exhibits an HTTP API. The installation was simple with Docker composed, and you can also use the Synology container manager for an even easier configuration. By default, the recorder serves a basic card on the 8083 port. It is not flashy, but it works. I saw my evening walk appear almost in real time. And if you are just looking to record your location from here, you can completely jump the front. If the importation of the history of your chronology is important for you, as it was for me, you will want to continue to install the frontend. The process is similar to the installation of the recorder and should not take more than an hour.

Associated with the Owntracks application on Android or iOS, the system also works offline. If the internet falls or if you have not configured external access, the data always land on your NAS or your home server as soon as your phone reconnects to the MQTT broker.

It must be said that Google does not facilitate the importation of your old location data. After having executed the export via Google Takeout, the import of my old data took a little devastating. Takeout gave me a json file folder, and it took a community script to convert them to the format that the expectation awaits. Once it was done, I pretended to be a decade of trips to Owntracks, I restarted the service and I looked at the database. It was not without friction, but once it worked, it was like going back to the old view of Google, except that this time, everything was self-heberled.

Despite the efforts related to the creation of owners, the end result is worth it. The process taught me all the variables that enter the service of the service and reminded me why self-hosting feels liberating. If I ever need to help out things, it should be trivial enough and each fix is ​​more or less definitive. I can choose to never update the service before a major version. More specifically, Google cannot mark my NAS as depreciated. Which, you would have achieved now, is a functionality in itself. In addition, if I want to change something, I can read the source code and add it.

Coming to the experience of using owners, it is predictable, is not as complete as a product by Google. Everything you get is a card with location markers showing where you have been. Since the service operates OpenStreetmaps, the data is not complete either. So, it may not be your best bet if you try to identify an old restaurant that you visited a decade ago, or if you expect additional modules like Street View to come back in your own steps.

But for all its limits, Owncls does a great job to help you visualize where you were at a specific time. Depending on your needs, this could be sufficient. Although the owners do not offer thermal cards or travel labels, it offers something more important: permanence. The data is in JSON files, carefully organized per year and per month. Any mapping library can read it. If I want a thermal card, I can generate one with Python in five minutes. There is a lot of flexibility here.

Of course, intimacy is the other most obvious victory. Nothing leaves my network unless I push it. The recorder supports end-to-end encryption with a pre-party key, so even if I synchronize the data between the sites, the raw coordinates remain protected. No analysis. No third -party servers, unless I choose to use them. Since the service is quite light, the material requirements have also been modest. You can run it on a spare Raspberry Pi if you wish. MQTT and the recorder use less than one percent CPU on a five -year NAS together. The front is just Nginx serving static files. A full year of movement data, recorded at intervals of ten seconds, weighs only a few hundred mega -speakers. It is a very small imprint, all well considered. I also superimposed additional amenities for more peace of mind. For example, location data support each evening not only to a second NAS, but also to – ironically – Google Drive.

Could a friend who are less inclined on the technical level reproduce this? Probably, if they are comfortable with Docker composed and a terminal. Owntracks is not Plug-And-Play, but community writings help fill the gaps. There are guides for synology, a non-frespberry pi and an ordinary Linux. And the tools improves each year. But I’m kidding if I said it was easy. In an ideal world, we should not have to manage a service like this. But with the hair approach of Google ham against beloved services, it’s probably for better.

I do not pretend that the owners are perfect. The mobile application sometimes stops publishing when the Android battery manager becomes too aggressive. The card viewer lacks research. Importing large data sets can freeze the user interface until the end of processing. But these are compromises with which I can live. Nor are they serious enough to hinder use. That said, the history of the location seems trivial until you lose it. Sometimes the only recording of a missed detour or turn that led you to a cool place is a point on a map. This point can jog a memory or simply remember that you have covered a lot of land that year. Now, this point lives permanently on my nas. If Google brings back the chronology tomorrow, I will stick to owners because of this permanence.