How to Export a Google Maps List to My Maps or a Spreadsheet

Google Maps has no button that exports a saved list or sends it to Google My Maps. Google's route is Takeout: select Saved at takeout.google.com and it exports each list as a CSV file with the place names, your notes and a Google Maps link for each place, but no coordinates. Open that file in Google Sheets, add the city, and import it into My Maps, which finds each place again by name. For a list of 20 places or fewer, copying the names by hand is quicker.

Here's each route, what it keeps and loses, and how to get the same list into a spreadsheet or an AI chat.

Do you need to move the list at all?

A list is fine for collecting places and navigating to them. Moving it is worth the effort when you want to split the trip into days with their own colors, share a finished map, print it, or hand the places to another tool. Google's help pages set the limits on each side:

If you're still deciding how to organize the trip, our guide to mapping your itinerary in Google Maps walks through using both together.

Route 1: Export the list with Google Takeout

Google's help page on lists points to Takeout for exporting. It works on a computer or a phone browser.

1. Open takeout.google.com while signed in with the account that owns the list.
2. Click Deselect all, then scroll down to Saved and check it. Leaving everything else unchecked keeps the export small.
3. Choose Next step, keep Export once and the .zip file type, and click Create export.
4. Download the file when Google emails you that it's ready, and unzip it. The Saved folder holds one CSV file per list.

Each file has a row per place with its name, your note and comment, and a Google Maps link. What it doesn't have is a latitude or longitude column. The link opens the right place in Google Maps, but My Maps can't read it as a location, so the import has to search for each place by name. That's the main thing Takeout loses, and the reason for the checks below.

Route 2: Copy the names by hand

For a weekend list, skip Takeout. Open the list in Google Maps on a computer, then type or paste each place's name into a sheet with two columns, Name and City, plus a third for notes if you want them. A 20-place list takes a few minutes, and you see each place again as you go, which is a good moment to drop the ones you've lost interest in.

Turn the file into a My Maps layer

The import itself is the same for both routes. Our guide to importing a file into Google My Maps covers it in depth; these are the steps that matter for a Takeout file.

1. Open the CSV in Google Sheets and delete the rows you no longer want.
2. Add a City column and fill it in for every row. A name on its own can match a same-named café or a chain branch in another town; the city narrows the search.
3. Split anything over 2,000 rows into two sheets. Google says not to import larger files, and a list can hold up to 3,000 places.
4. In My Maps, create a map, select Add layer, then Import, and choose the sheet from Google Drive.
5. Choose the name and City columns to place the pins, and the name column to title them.
6. Check every pin. Look for strays outside the city and for places that landed on the wrong branch. The Google Maps link from the export comes along as a field on each pin, so you can open it and compare.

From there, split the stops into one layer per day and give each day its own color. The steps for that are in the import guide, along with how to open the map on your phone and what works offline.

Tools that read a list link

Several web tools take a shared list's link and return a file with coordinates, ready for My Maps or GPS apps. They can save the re-matching step on a long list. Two cautions: the list has to be set to shared, so anyone with the link can see it, and the tool will see everything in it, including your notes. Set the list back to private when you're done, and read what each tool keeps.

Give the list to ChatGPT or Gemini

A shared list link opens a page that Google Maps builds in your browser, and a chatbot may read little from it or fill the gaps with guesses. Pasting the names takes that out of the equation. Copy them from the list or the Takeout CSV, and give the chatbot the details it can't know:

Here are places I saved for Lisbon, with my notes:
Time Out Market - lunch, not dinner
Jerónimos Monastery - want to go inside
Pastéis de Belém
Miradouro da Senhora do Monte - sunset
LX Factory - Sunday market?

I'm there May 12 to 15, staying in Baixa, walking and taking trams.
Group these into days by neighborhood and suggest an order for each day.
Flag anything that needs a ticket or a reservation. Don't add places I didn't list.

The last line matters: without it, chatbots tend to pad each day with suggestions of their own. Then treat the answer as a draft. Opening hours, ticket rules and travel times are the details to check first, and our guide to checking an AI travel itinerary covers what to verify. What ChatGPT can and can't do for trip planning explains why.

Where Vidtrip fits

If your list started as places from a YouTube travel guide, you can skip the export. Paste the guide's link into Vidtrip, answer four questions about your trip, and it writes a day-by-day plan from the video, keeping the creator's picks and linking each one to its moment in the video. The full plan pins every stop on a map and downloads as a KML file with the days as layers, which imports into My Maps as is. Import your Takeout sheet as another layer of the same map, and your own saves sit beside the guide's stops.

To try it, paste a guide's link into the generator.