gmymaps

Impetus

Google Maps has a convenient feature for saving points of interest, called My Maps. Such maps are useful for sharing locations with friends. Unfortunately, Google does not provide an API to programatically view or update a MyMaps map¹, and it is unlikely to be available any time soon.

This package acts as a simple wrapper around the endpoints used by the official My Maps web app, essentially mimicking the web app's behavior.

Try it out!

1. Head over to My Maps and create a My Maps map.
2. On Google Drive, make the map publicly accessible by sharing it as link for anyone to edit.

Fetching map data

import gmymaps

map_id = 'your-map-id-here'
client = gmymaps.get_client()
result = client.get_map_data(map_id)

Editing points and layers

from gmymaps import PointAttrs, PointAttrType

map_id = 'your-map-id-here'
layer_id = client.create_layer(map_id)
client.update_layer(map_id, layer_id, layer_name='My New Layer')

point_id = client.create_point(map_id, layer_id)
attrs = (PointAttrs()
    .add_attr(PointAttrType.NAME, "My New Point")
    .add_attr(PointAttrType.DESCRIPTION, "This is an interesting place to go!")
    .add_attr(PointAttrType.COORD, [1.37, 103.75]))
client.update_point(map_id, layer_id, point_id, attrs)

client.delete_point(map_id, layer_id, point_id)
client.delete_layer(map_id, layer_id)

Cookies

When attempting to access a private map, requests will be redirected to a sign-in page. This redirection occurs even if the map is shared with a service account and accessed using OAuth credentials from that account. To bypass this, you can save a session cookie, similar to yt-dlp's --cookies-from-browser feature. For more details, refer to cookie.py.

Future work

• Creating convenience wrappers like Map and Layer
• Changing of point colors
• Uploading and downloading of KML files

References

1: Link to issue: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35820262