How to Open Google Takeout Files

Step 2: What you find inside

Once extracted, the archive opens into a top-level folder usually called Takeout. Inside that is one folder per Google product you exported: Location History, My Activity, YouTube and YouTube Music, Chrome, Mail, and so on. Each product stores its data in whatever format Google decided fits it best, so a single export can contain five or six different file types at once.

• JSON for structured activity data: Location History, Search and Web Activity, and most My Activity records.
• HTML for human-facing timelines, such as the My Activity pages you can scroll in a browser.
• MBOX for Gmail, a single large mailbox file holding every message.
• CSV for tabular data like Contacts and some YouTube metadata.
• KML for map paths, an XML format that plots your movement on a map.

For a fuller tour of what an export contains and why, see what is Google Takeout. The sample below shows what those raw folders look like once they have been parsed into plain numbers.

Step 3: How to open each file format

There is no single program that opens a Takeout export cleanly, because it is a mix of formats. Here is the right tool for each one.

• HTML files: open in any browser. These are the easiest to skim. Double-click and they open in Chrome, Safari, Edge, or Firefox as a readable page. Google generates HTML timelines for My Activity, so this is the friendliest format in the whole archive.
• JSON files: open in a text editor or browser. Double-click and they open in a browser tab or a plain-text editor like Notepad or TextEdit. They will open, but they look like raw code: nested brackets, long numeric timestamps, and no formatting. More on that problem below.
• CSV files: open in a spreadsheet. Use Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets. Contacts and some YouTube data land here, and a spreadsheet turns the rows and columns into something you can sort and filter.
• MBOX files: open in an email client. Gmail exports as a single MBOX file, which a browser cannot read. Import it into Mozilla Thunderbird or another client that supports MBOX to browse your messages.
• KML files: open in Google Earth. These plot location paths on a map. Load them into Google Earth to see routes drawn out geographically.

For the deep dive on the trickiest format of the bunch, read our Google Takeout JSON viewer guide.

The catch: opening the file is not the same as reading it

Here is the part that surprises most people. The JSON files open without any trouble. They are just impossible to actually read. Google formats them for machines, not humans, so what you get is a wall of raw data.

• Timestamps are Unix epoch numbers. Instead of "January 1, 2024 at 9:00 AM" you see 1704099600000. Every single record is dated this way.
• Coordinates are E7 integers. A latitude of 40.7128 is stored as 407128000. You cannot map it in your head, and there are thousands of them.
• Records are scattered. A single day of activity can be split across nested folders and multiple files, with no summary anywhere.

So you can double-click a JSON file, watch it open in your browser, and still have no idea how many places you visited last year or what you searched most. The file opened. It just did not tell you anything. That gap between "opened" and "readable" is the whole reason the next step exists.

The easy path: drop the ZIP onto TakeoutReader

If you just want to know what is in your export, there is a shortcut that removes every step above. TakeoutReader reads the whole archive and turns it into a plain-English report. No unzipping, no picking the right program per format, no technical skill.

1. Get your export. Request it at takeout.google.com if you have not already. Google emails you the ZIP within an hour or two.
2. Drop the ZIP onto the page. You do not extract it first. TakeoutReader reads the contents directly. There is no upload, so nothing leaves your device.
3. Read your report. Timestamps become real dates, E7 coordinates become named places, and the scattered files become clean counts: how many searches, top sites, most active years, and more.

Because the file is parsed in your browser, you can verify there is no upload by opening DevTools and watching the Network tab while the report builds. No request containing your file leaves your device. For a deeper walkthrough of what the report surfaces, see what does Google know about me, or explore the Google Location History viewer for how the KML and JSON location data is turned into a readable timeline.

Common problems opening Takeout files

• The ZIP will not extract. Usually the download was incomplete or interrupted. Re-download it from the Takeout email link, which stays valid for a week.
• A JSON file opens as one giant unbroken line. That is normal. Google does not pretty-print the JSON. A code editor with a JSON formatter can indent it, but it will still be full of raw timestamps.
• Gmail is just one enormous file. That is the MBOX. A browser will not open it. Import it into Thunderbird instead.
• Your phone freezes on a large archive. Mobile devices are not built to extract multi-gigabyte ZIPs. Move the file to a computer.
• Half the export is missing. Check whether your export was split into multiple ZIP parts. You have to download and extract all of them.

Frequently asked questions