Saved places pile up. Restaurants, viewpoints, work spots - hundreds of them across dozens of lists, saved on a phone and then effectively lost, because Google Maps is good at saving and poor at recall.
Application overview
Private · single user
ELSOLVE keeps one person’s saved places where they can find them.
ELSOLVE is a private, internal application built and operated by ELSOLVE LTD for a single user: the company’s own director. It reads that user’s saved Google Maps lists through Google’s official Data Portability API and files them into a personal knowledge base, so places saved on a phone months ago can actually be found again later. It is not a product, it is not offered to customers, and it has exactly one account connected to it.
Why it exists.
The alternative was a manual export. Downloading a Google Takeout archive by hand every time the data went stale is the kind of chore that gets skipped, and skipped data is the same as no data.
So this application automates that one step, and only that step, using the API Google provides for exactly this purpose - no scraping, no browser sessions, no stored cookies.
The result is searchable from the owner’s own notes. Ask for “that ramen place in London” and the list it was saved to, and the note written at the time, come back.
How it works.
01
The owner grants access, once
A standard Google consent screen, signed in as the account that owns the lists. Access can be withdrawn at any time from the Google account settings page, and the application stops working the moment it is.
02
It asks Google for an export
Once a day, the application asks Google’s Data Portability API to build an archive of the owner’s saved collections and starred places, then downloads it from the signed link Google returns.
03
It files the results privately
The archive is read into a private store on hardware the owner controls, keyed so that re-running it updates existing entries rather than duplicating them. Nothing is published, shared, or sent onward.
04
The owner searches it
A local command-line tool queries that store by name, list, or note. It is the only consumer of the data, and it runs on the same machine.
What it reads, and why.
Two read-only scopes, both from Google’s Data Portability API. The application requests nothing else, and it never writes to any Google service.
01
dataportability.saved.collections
The owner’s saved collections - the Google Maps lists themselves, with the place names, list names and personal notes attached to them. This is the data the application exists to retrieve.
02
dataportability.maps.starred_places
The owner’s starred places. Requested alongside the first scope so that starred places, which Google exports separately, are not silently missing from the result.
Questions about this application.
For anything about how this application handles data, write to the address opposite.
That includes a request to see or delete what it holds. Access can also be withdrawn directly from Google account permissions at any time, without asking us.