Chrome extension · Google Photos
Google Photos draws you a map of everywhere you've been, but only on your phone. Photo Heat Map brings it to the browser you actually work in, and keeps every coordinate on your own machine.
5.0 from 6 ratings · 123 users · on the Chrome Web Store
01 The gap
Open Google Photos on your phone and there's a map of your whole library: every trip, every weekend, every place you stopped long enough to take a picture. Open photos.google.com on a laptop and it's gone.
So the one screen big enough to actually explore a whole photo library is the one screen where you can't. You're left scrolling a timeline, trying to remember whether Lisbon was 2019 or 2021.
Photo Heat Map puts the map back on the big screen, in the browser, without sending a single coordinate anywhere.
02 How it works
Sign in to photos.google.com as you normally would. A Heat Map button appears at the bottom-right of the page.
The first run indexes your library in the background, newest photos first. The map fills in live while it works. Tens of thousands of photos take minutes, not hours, and closing the tab doesn't lose your progress.
Blobs resolve from one glow over your city into individual streets. The grid beside the map shows the photos in view. Click one and it opens in Google Photos.
03 What you get
A true heat layer climbing blue, green, yellow, red as the photos pile up, so you see at a glance where your life happened, not a thousand overlapping markers. It re-aggregates as you zoom, and stays glued to the map while it moves.
Pan to Rome, and the grid beside the map becomes your Rome photos: newest first, counted, and clickable straight through to Google Photos.
Type a city or a country and the map flies to it, heat surface intact.
A start and end date, with quick presets, so you can watch a single summer light up instead of everything at once.
Geotagged videos are on the map too, marked as video, and play inline in the lightbox without leaving the page.
Your index lives in the browser's own database, so reopening is immediate. New photos are picked up quietly in the background, and an interrupted first run resumes exactly where it stopped.
04 Privacy
This is the part most map tools get wrong, so here it is in plain terms: there is no server to send your data to. There isn't one, because the extension never needed one.
Coordinates, place names and timestamps are written to IndexedDB, your browser's own storage, on your own disk. Nothing is uploaded. There is no account to make and no login to us.
Exactly two destinations: Google, using the session you're already signed in to, to read your own library; and OpenStreetMap, for the background map tiles. Tile requests reveal only which part of the world is on screen. Never a photo, never a location of yours.
Nothing. No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no advertising SDK. The developer receives no data of any kind, because none is ever sent.
A Wipe local data button permanently deletes everything the extension has stored. Uninstalling does the same. Your Google Photos account is only ever read, never modified, never deleted from, never uploaded to.
Two permissions, both doing exactly what they say: access to photos.google.com to read your own library, and storage to keep the index locally so the map opens instantly. Read the full privacy policy →
05 Changelog
Every release, and what actually changed in it.
06 Questions
No. Nothing leaves your computer. The extension reads your library through the Google session already open in your browser and stores the results locally. There is no server on our side to receive anything.
No. There's no login step at all. It works because you're already signed in to Google Photos in that browser, the same way the Google Photos website itself works.
Minutes for most libraries. It reads about 500 photos per request and paces itself politely, so a library of 50,000 photos is roughly a hundred requests. The map is usable immediately and fills in while it runs.
Only photos with location data can be placed on a map. Pictures taken with location off, scans, and most screenshots have no coordinates. The extension shows you how many items fall into that category rather than quietly dropping them.
Because you get the original file, not a compressed stream. The extension plays the video Google serves for download, so a long clip shot at 4K can be hundreds of megabytes.
Usually your browser can play that while it arrives and it starts almost at once. When it cannot, the extension has to fetch the whole file before it can show a single frame, and that is the slow case. Once it is in that mode it quietly pulls the next few videos in the background, so the second and third start much faster than the first, and the last handful you watched stay ready to replay.
Either way the video comes straight from Google to you. There is no server of ours in the middle to slow it down.
It is the same idea, on a screen where Google does not offer it. The phone app has a map of your library; the Google Photos website has no equivalent. Photo Heat Map reads the same library from your signed-in session and draws it in the browser.
Never. It only reads. It cannot edit, delete, move or upload anything in your account.
Free, with no paid tier, no trial and no ads. It costs nothing to run, because there is no server, so there is nothing to recoup.
Chrome, and Chromium-based browsers that accept Chrome Web Store extensions (Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi). Firefox and Safari aren't supported.
The extension reads the same internal interface the Google Photos website uses, which Google can change without notice. If that happens you'll get a clear message saying an update is needed, not a blank map, and your existing cached map keeps working meanwhile.
Install it, open Google Photos, and watch your whole library land on the map in a couple of minutes.
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