Turn Google Maps pins into planning points

For the vast majority of cyclists, trip planning starts the same way. Read a report about someone else’s experience, watch their videos, or get an idea from a friend, then drop pins into Google Maps: a campsite here, a coffee stop there, a bike shop, a ferry, a viewpoint, whatever. It happens in scraps of spare time, weeks or months before the trip is real, and you rarely think about it as planning. But when you finally get around to plotting a route, all of those pinned places turn out to be useful: they’re every destination you have already picked out, sitting there waiting.

The problem is how to get those pinned places out of Google Maps. Saved Lists hold all the pins, but there’s no easy way to take a whole list and put it in a new file somewhere else. Google Takeout exports the entire archive, which is far more data than anyone wants to dig through to recover one trip’s worth of points.

For this particular task, a tiny utility called ExportMyMap gets the job done. Go to one of your saved lists, choose a format, and get a clean file containing only the places from that list, in CSV, KML, GeoJSON, GPX, spreadsheet form, or even a printable PDF.

How it fits with route planning

It’s worth being clear about what a file like that is: it’s a collection of points, not a route. cycle.travel builds a journey by calculating a path between via points, and when it imports a GPX file it expects a track to follow — so a bare list of café and campsite pins isn’t something the route-planner can use directly.

Where it earns its keep is as a reference while you plan. Just export the relevant Google list, leave it visible in another tab or printed out beside you while you’re working in cycle.travel, and use it to decide where the route should actually go. As you drop your via points, you already know that the campsite on day three and the only resupply within 40km are taken care of. The planning still happens in cycle.travel, where it belongs; the exported list simply stops you forgetting the places that made you want to do the trip in the first place.

In most cases the CSV or spreadsheet format works best here, letting you list points with their names, descriptions and coordinates, and sort or tick them off however you like. KML is handy if you’d rather see everything laid out on a map before you begin.

Other uses

Beyond a single trip, this makes a tidy backup. If you’ve been adding pins for years, across several countries and a dozen tours, exporting the results makes them portable and keeps them from being trapped inside one Google account. It’s also a simple way to hand your favourite places to a friend who’s joining you on a particular ride, without them having to recreate every pin by hand.

It may not be a flashy solution, but it removes a small, recurring annoyance — and lets you finally make use of all those years of collected places.