The feature, which launched two years ago for Android users, helps you remember travels and activities around your neighborhood and beyond by tracking your movements everywhere you go.
While some might actually find that a little creepy, Google presents Timeline as a fun and potentially useful tool for reminding yourself of past trips, or for eliminating the guesswork when trying to recall a place you visited or a time when you did a particular activity.
Aimed at providing “a daily snapshot” of your life, users can edit their Timeline if the recorded information is ever a little off, or even delete a day’s worth of data, a specific date range, or the whole darn lot if you really don’t want to be reminded of a particular day’s shenanigans.
It also includes a range of activity and transportation types, allowing you to select from a list to add more detail that could prove useful for later reference.
To access Timeline, simply hit the menu button top left and select it from the drop-down menu, or tap the place card of a location or business you’ve previously visited. In a post announcing Timeline for iOS, Google Maps product manager Gerard Sanz explained: “So if you went to Point Reyes National Seashore a few days ago, the dates of your past visits will appear on the place card (only visible to you). From there you can tap directly into Your Timeline to get the dates and details of your visits and rediscover the experience.”
Timeline also offers monthly emails “summarizing the cities, countries, and places you’ve visited.” However, if you’d rather not be reminded that you were just too darn busy to manage anything beyond the daily commute, you can turn them off by hitting the feature’s settings tab and toggling the “Timeline emails” button.
The launch of Timeline for the iOS version of Google Maps comes in the same week as the company announced it’s added a brand new exploration element to its other globe-focused tool, Google Earth. You can find out all about it here.
