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Saved places

Signed-in users can keep their own places on the map. The Save button on any place card adds that place to a list, and the Saved panel, opened from the main menu, lets you manage them. Saving is tied to your account, so your lists follow you across devices.

Lists and labels​

The Saved panel has two tabs:

  • Lists: collections of places. Every account starts with three built-in lists: Favorites, Want to go, and Starred places. You can also create your own lists, give them a name and an emoji icon, and add or remove places from a list's detail view. Each saved place can carry a free-text note.
  • Labeled: single, named places for fast recall, such as Home and Work. Labeled places are set from the Add a label row on a place's Overview tab, and they surface near the top of search.

Importing places​

In Saved → Lists, choose Import and select one or more files. To add places to a particular list, open that list and choose Import places… from its overflow (⋮) menu. Review each detected list, edit its name, and choose a new list or an existing destination before importing. Existing places with the same name and nearly identical coordinates are skipped as duplicates.

Supported formats are:

  • Google Takeout ZIP, individual saved-list CSV, and Saved Places.json from both older and current exports. Unrelated archive contents, including reviews, are ignored.
  • KML and KMZ bookmarks, including every KML file inside a KMZ. Folders remain together in their document's list. A KML that only links to online data must be exported again without the keep data up to date option.
  • GPX waypoints (favourites). Tracks and routes are ignored. A GPX containing several waypoint groups becomes one list per group.
  • GeoJSON Point features, with names, descriptions, and addresses.
  • CSV with latitude and longitude columns (lat/latitude/y and lon/lng/long/longitude/x), optionally a name/title, note/description/comment, and address.

For a Google Takeout export, open Google Takeout, deselect unrelated products, and include Saved for saved lists. Maps (your places) is optional, for older starred places. Non-place saves, such as films or images saved from search, and empty lists are ignored. Create and download a ZIP export, then select the whole ZIP in OpenMapX. You can also select the saved-list CSV files or Saved Places JSON separately. Recognized Favorites, Want to go, and Starred places lists default to the corresponding built-in list when it exists; you can change the destination during review.

Files are read in your browser. Missing or approximate locations are looked up through this server's configured geocoder using the place name and available address or nearby location. These lookups follow the server's provider settings; the importer does not contact Google directly. Captured source credits stay with imported places, including credits for coordinates found by the geocoder. The review shows the credits that will be saved with the selected places.

Ready places have file coordinates or a matching geocoder result. Approximate places retain an estimated location from the export that could not be verified. They are excluded by default; include them only if that uncertainty is acceptable. Not found places have no usable coordinates and are skipped; expand the count to see their names. Check the result summary for imported places, duplicates, and any failures. Successful batches remain saved if a later batch fails. Each selected file and its expanded archive contents are limited to 200 MiB, with at most 10,000 archive entries.

Exporting a list​

Export a list to use its places in another map or geographic tool:

FormatBest forFile
GPXGPS devices and outdoor apps (OsmAnd, Organic Maps…).gpx
GeoJSONWeb maps, GIS tools, and scripting.geojson
KMLGoogle Earth and Google My Maps.kml

Open the Saved panel, go to the Lists tab, open a list, then use the list's overflow (⋮) menu and choose Export as GPX, Export as GeoJSON, or Export as KML. The file downloads named after the list (for example favorites.gpx).

Each exported place includes its name and coordinates, plus its address and note where you've set them (these become the description in GPX and KML). GeoJSON additionally preserves OpenMapX's internal place ID in the feature properties.

OpenMapX preserves captured source credits through GPX, KML, and GeoJSON export and re-import. Its exports also keep addresses separate from personal notes, so re-importing a list does not add generated credits or address lines to your notes.

Export scope

Export covers the places in a single list. Labeled places (Home, Work) and exporting every list at once aren't part of export yet.

How saved data is protected​

Signed-in lists, labels, names, coordinates, addresses, notes, and place metadata are stored as server-readable rows in this deployment's PostgreSQL database. Use HTTPS to protect them in transit. Private saved-data API requests are scoped to the signed-in account. The content is not end-to-end encrypted: the API and an operator with database access can read it. Database backups retain the rows that existed when each backup was made, until the operator's backup-retention period expires.

See Accounts and your data for data-access requests and account deletion, and the user-data trust model for implementation details.

Sharing a list​

Any list can be published through a share link, a short URL (https://<your-host>/s/…) that anyone can open without an account. Open a list, press Share, and choose the link type:

  • Live: viewers always see the current list, including later edits.
  • Snapshot: viewers see the list exactly as it was when the link was created.

Links can be given an optional expiry (Never, 1, 7, or 30 days), reset (the old URL stops working immediately and a new one is issued), or deleted at any time. Revocation is immediate and responses are non-cacheable (Cache-Control: no-store).

Each account can hold 100 share links, including expired links until deleted. Snapshot lists support at most 1,000 places. Live list reads also return at most 1,000 entries, so use smaller lists when sharing a large collection.

Anyone with the URL can read the shared content. The page omits account identity and asks search engines not to index it; that does not prevent recipients from copying or forwarding it. Place names, notes, addresses, and locations can still identify you. Review them before creating a link.

The database stores a hash of the bearer token, while the list or snapshot content remains readable to the server. A revoked link cannot retract copies a recipient already saved.

Manage every link you've created under Account settings → Shared links.