How to use the Google Maps app offline. Google maps offline Does google maps work without the Internet

Google maps Is one of the most popular and reliable navigation services, but it is also not without its drawbacks. One of the main complaints from users about Google Maps is that navigation only works with the Internet and requires a very good signal to render the terrain. Fortunately, Google Maps can be used offline, but this great feature turns out to be useless without considering the points described in the article. So, are you getting ready to go on a trip or heading for a hike in uncharted terrain? Then this tutorial on using Google Maps offline is for you.
Before using Google Maps offline, you need to download the area or region of interest. The offline map of the area must be loaded before you move away from the source of the Internet.

It is worth noting that the cards that you can save offline have quite large volumes. For example, you can completely cache large cities such as Kiev, Minsk or Moscow. They also take up a lot of space in flash memory, sometimes 1.5 GB, depending on the downloaded region. There is a way to download this data to an SD card to save space on your phone's memory. To do this just go to Menu> Offline Areas> Settings> Storage Settings and switch from Device to SD card.

It is also worth noting that these cards' cache expires after 30 days. This is because the maps themselves are updated, they are dynamic and require adjustments. For example, a new restaurant has appeared in the city, or a dam blocked the river and it is no longer on the map. Google wants you to have the most recent version of maps for the best user experience.

So that your "saved maps" do not need to be downloaded again, just activate "automatic update of offline maps" in the settings. Now the cache of your cards will be update regularly and you will always have the most recent version of Google Maps. Also, in the settings, you can set the update only via Wi-Fi in order to save the gigabytes of your mobile Internet provided by the telecom operator.

How to download and save offline Google Maps

• Open the Google Maps app
• Find the area or locality you want to download
• If you were looking for a specific location, a name bar should appear at the bottom of the screen. If not, just press and hold a button somewhere on the map to show that section. Click on it to display other options
• Then click "Download"
• Now you can zoom in and out by increasing or decreasing the loading area.
• Having selected the area of ​​interest, click the "Download" button in the lower right corner

After downloading your maps, you can navigate and find GPS routes in the same way as in the online version, but without using the Internet. As you can see, everything is quite simple and convenient. It is also worth noting that not all elements from online maps will be available in offline Google maps. For example, some walking and cycling routes are not transferred when the map cache is saved. Everything else works as expected. You can find the addresses you want, find companies and easily navigate the map.

When everything is in one place in a good navigator.

Any iOS device comes with an application Cards... And although Apple is actively developing its own map service, due to a number of features of its work, users from the CIS countries prefer third-party navigators.

A place in the sun was won by a service from Google - Google maps... Three months ago, the mobile version of the application received the long-awaited one, which at first worked exclusively on Android and only recently made it to iOS.

Convenient, economical, practical ... But it turns on, to put it mildly, it is not obvious:

Note: A Google account is strictly required for offline use. Before enabling offline access log in to the Maps application.

1. Open up Google maps and in the search bar, find the locality or address you are interested in.
2. Call the side settings menu (tap on the three dashes near the search bar) and click on the item Downloaded areas.
3. In the window that opens, click on the " + ».
4. Google will offer to download a map for the entered area, region or city. By changing the scale, you can significantly reduce the final size of the map (more zoom - smaller map). After determining the size of the map, click Download.
5. Give the card any convenient name and click Save.
6. Wait for the download to finish. The finished map will go to the section Downloaded areas.

The peculiarity of offline mode in Google Maps is that the saved image is available within 30 days from the moment of loading. Upon expiration, Google recommends updating the added area map from the corresponding section.

By the way. If your iPhone doesn't have enough memory, try this .

Offline mode allows you to use the application as a navigator (including a voice assistant), but the display of current traffic jams and the current traffic situation (if there is no connection) will not be available. You cannot download country maps.

For detailed settings, see the explanatory video:

If you find yourself outside the access zone, it doesn't matter, because you can search for objects and draw up routes in Google Maps offline.

Our instructions are for the latest version of Google Maps for Android and iOS. In earlier versions of the application, the names of the menu items may differ slightly.

Save Google Maps on iOS

• Open the Google Maps app on. At the top of the search bar, enter the name of the city or region you want to use.
• To get as large a section of the map as possible, zoom out. Don't worry, in the offline version you can enlarge the map to the size you want.
• Click on the search bar and enter "ok maps". You will see the Google Maps logo with a loading bar. Typically, the map is loaded in a couple of seconds, after which it is saved to the application cache. If the section you selected is too large, you will see a corresponding notification.
• Disable internet access and restart Maps. Now you can search for addresses and build routes on saved areas offline.

We use offline maps on Android

• Open Google Maps on and select the area you want to save.
• Go to the application menu (three stripes near the search bar) and go to the "Offline maps" section.
• Then everything is simple: click the "Select a card" button and confirm the marked area by clicking "Download".
• Just like in iOS, you will see how much space the saved map will take. If this is not enough, try shrinking the selected area.

My Maps: Processing Maps with Google Drive

You can also access your maps using the Google Drive app. Then you don't have to waste a lot of memory to save maps from Google Maps.

• Open the Google Drive page and sign in to your Google account.
• Click New - More - Google My Maps.
• Here you can edit and save routes, take notes on maps, and add layers.
• You can also share maps with friends via Google Drive.

Hello dear readers! Leafing through the pages of the blog "Roads of Life" you have probably noticed more than once that we try to make detailed route maps with marked sights on them. It is convenient, you can immediately imagine where this or that object is, and estimate the approximate distance to it. However, there is one drawback - the blog works only online and, accordingly, you can also view all the maps on it if you have an Internet connection.

But what if you want to take your favorite map with you with a ready-made route and markers on the map, and not look for Wi-Fi points in an unfamiliar city, but use it offline? I would like to please you, everyone has such an opportunity! You can download any google map with tags from our blog and take it with you. Today I will show you how to do this.

First of all, we go to the page with the travel itinerary.

Find a google map in the text and click on the "Enlarge map" button.

When the map is zoomed in, on the side panel we find an icon with three dots, as in the picture below.

Click on the icon and select "Download KML" in the drop-down list.

In the window that opens, leave everything unchanged and click "OK", and then save the file.

Hooray! Half the battle is done! The map has been downloaded from us, it remains only to open it.

Go to the folder where by default all your files are downloaded (usually the Downloads folder), find the required map with the .kmz extension and copy it to your mobile device in the usual way. Do not be alarmed that the extension has changed, .kmz is a zipped .kml file.

If you downloaded directly to your smartphone, look for the saved kml file in the Download folder.

We will open the .kmz file using the very cool program maps.me. If it is still not in your mobile device, then we urgently run to the official website and download the fresh version for our gadget.

Why is maps.me so useful? Maps.me is an app with free offline maps of the whole world. The maps are very well detailed: restaurants, parks, cafes, ATMs ... Now you will find literally everything in an unfamiliar city. In addition, you can put your own marks on the map. Your movements are tracked by a GPS navigator. So getting lost with maps.me is not possible at all, although it may be possible, but you have to try very hard 🙂 The application is absolutely free and will save a lot of nerves and money in roaming.

So. A little distracted. Download the application from the official website and install it on your mobile device.

After installation and launch, the program will automatically offer to download a map of the area where you are at the moment. This may or may not be done if the purpose of your visit is another country or region.

We go to the program menu and find the function "Load maps".

After that we load the area on which we will apply labels. We wait a bit while the map is loading.

There is one last step! Apply the marks saved in the .kmz file to the prepared map to use it without an Internet connection. To do this, open the file on your mobile device using the usual File Manager, having previously indicated the folder into which it was saved when copying.

Hooray! Tags loaded! It remains to charge your mobile device and hit the road! 😉

On a note! If you download the map directly to your smartphone, bypassing the computer, a situation may arise when the program writes that the tags have been loaded, but in fact they are not. The solution to this problem is simple. Try to download only the kml-layer with labels, and not the whole map using the described instructions. To do this, during “Export to kml” (see the screenshot above), you need to select the name of the desired layer instead of “All Map”.

PS: if during the installation process you have any unexpected situations, or you want to get acquainted with the rest of the functions of the maps.me program, as well as get answers to the most common questions, take a look on the official website in the "Help" section or write to the "Service support ".

In addition to maps.me, be sure to install the following applications on your phone: Hotellook (android, IOS) and Aviasales (android, IOS). Access to hotel and plane booking systems will always be at your fingertips. They helped me out more than once! Bright and unforgettable travel!

In a recent update, the Google Maps Android app received a host of new offline features. Let's see what offline capabilities Google Maps now has.

The announcement at the Google I / O 2015 Developers Conference in May that it was possible to fully work with the Google Maps application without access to the Internet came as a real surprise. This includes address search, POI search, routing, as well as changing routes. The features are really useful, but few expected such a move from such a progressive and internet-oriented company.

(Fragment about Google Maps at the presentation from 1:24:08)

About six months have passed, and now all the promised offline functions can be used in the current version of the Google Maps application for Android.

Offline navigation and work with Google Maps without the Internet may be necessary when access to the World Wide Web may be difficult in one place or another, it is unprofitable to use the Internet while in roaming, or for other reasons.

At the moment there are many applications, including free (for example), focused on using maps without access to the Internet, but we definitely welcome the emergence of new offline functions in Google Maps. The user has a wider choice of a suitable solution.

There were some solutions related to offline work of Google Maps before. For example, the ability to download a selected area on a map has been available for several years. At first, this feature was present in the experimental development section, but later it became available as usual.

But the value of offline use of the Google Maps mobile application until recently was very small, because it was impossible to make an address search, find an institution of interest by request in the search bar, or build a route to the desired place. Now a lot has changed.

Let's note the main functions of the Google Maps application for Android, related to work without access to the Internet:

• downloading the selected area on the map for offline access (the possibility existed before);
• address search, search for establishments, companies, ATMs, gas stations, etc. (POI);
• viewing a brief description, mode of operation, contact information (if specified), ratings from users of the object of interest;
• laying a route and measuring the distance between points;
• navigation mode along the selected route with automatic route correction in case of deviation.

How do I take advantage of these offline features?

First, you must first download the area of ​​interest on the map. Address search, POI search, route planning, etc. without the Internet will work in this downloaded area. You will not be able, for example, to look for ATMs in Dnepropetrovsk if you downloaded only a section of the map with Kiev.

And then you can use Google Maps without the Internet, as if you were working as usual. Please note that the details of downloaded maps for offline access will be more modest.

When choosing a downloadable area, the program preliminarily estimates how much data this area can take. Note that the application overestimates the estimated volume, and greatly. For example, choosing a site covering Kiev instead of the declared 250 MB, the downloaded map took only 52 MB.

The list of plots uploaded for offline access is in a separate menu item. You can update the data or delete unwanted areas.

If the downloaded area includes several settlements, there are no restrictions for building routes between these settlements. By the way, with offline access, only car routes are used.

The quality of the routes being laid is very high. Thanks to the advanced algorithms used in Google Maps for this.

The navigation mode itself along the selected route is quite convenient. The most necessary settings and functions are there, but, of course, special applications for car GPS navigation, such as iGO, will be much more advanced in this regard.

We are very enthusiastic about the new offline features added to Google Maps. Now, even if it is difficult to access the Internet, the Google Maps application will still be very useful.