I have a ton of saved places that appear on my Google Maps - but there is no way to manage, filter or search them. Is there a way to access these locations by API?
I scanned the maps api and can't find any reference. Is there another Google API that makes this available?
Currently the list of saved places in My Maps is not available via an API. There is a feature request tracking this you can use to follow along @ https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-issues/issues/detail?id=2953.
There do have a REST API can retrieve the saved places.
http://www.google.com/bookmarks/?output=xml
Visit this link to get more information. https://www.google.com/bookmarks/
There are also api like:
https://www.google.com/bookmarks/find?q=conf&output=xml&num=10000 https://www.google.com/bookmarks/lookup?
But seems like they have been deprecated and most of document are not available anymore. Use them as you own risk.
/bookmarks is too general and not one bit like a proper API endpoint. This feels like some XML export tool leftover from 2007, and may very well be deprecated sooner rather than later.
When accessing the Google maps list through https://www.google.com/maps and the "Saved" menu entry to the left, a request to www.google.com/maps/preview/entitylist/getlist returns a json-like data structure that contains the name, comment and coordinates of the entries in the list.
The first 4 characters of the returned value are not part of the json data structure. In the remaining object, the list of places is found in a nested list in cleaned_data[[1]][[9]] (R notation).
The elements of this list can be parsed with a an R function like this:
# Function to convert a single entry to a GPX waypoint
to_gpx <- function(x) {
# Extract name, latitude, longitude, and comment from the list
name <- x[[3]]
lat <- x[[2]][[6]][3]
lon <- x[[2]][[6]][4]
comment <- x[[4]] # Extract the comment
# Create the GPX waypoint string including the comment as description
gpx_string <- paste0(
'<wpt lat="', lat, '" lon="', lon, '">',
'<name>', name, '</name>',
'<desc>', comment, '</desc>',
'</wpt>'
)
return(gpx_string)
}
To not having to deal with credentials and sessions and stuff, I made a firefox plugin that parses any replies from that url and converts them to gpx. The source code can be found here: https://github.com/tux2000/Google-Maps-Lists-GPX-Exporter-Firefox and the plugin can be installed from here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-maps-lists-gpx-exporter/
There's still no official API for this as of 2025, but I built a workaround tool that intercepts Google Maps' internal API request when you navigate to your saved list. This gives you the full list including coordinates without needing to reverse-engineer anything manually. It then uses Playwright to automate moving pins between lists via the UI.
In testing across ~300 pins across multiple East Asian cities it achieved ~91% success.
