Download your Fusion Tables data and migrate your maps

By Paras Unadkat, Product Manager, Google

Last year, we announced plans to shut down Google Fusion Tables, an experimental project to help visualize large datasets, especially on a map. With three months to go until shutdown on December 3, 2019, we wanted to share progress on new tools to make it easier for you to download your data and migrate your maps.

Download your data with Google Takeout

If you created many tables over the years, we’ve made it easy to download all your data in one step with a new dedicated Fusion Tables option in Google Takeout. You can save the rows, metadata and geometries of any base tables that you own, and export this data in the following formats: JSON, CSV and KML.

Migrate your maps with a new open source tool

We’ve seen a lot of great maps created with Fusion Tables, including data journalism projects that shouldn’t have to disappear along with Fusion Tables. That’s why we’ve partnered with Ubilabs to create a new open source tool built to preserve maps generated with Fusion Tables. To get started, go to the Fusion Tables Archive Tool and select the tables you want to export. You will need to give the tool access to your Google Drive and Fusion Tables so that it can read your tables and write archives. Here’s how it works:

1. The data for each table is saved to its own “archive”. The data will be saved in a Google Sheet; for datasets beyond the size limits of Sheets, you’ll get a CSV. This archive is stored in a top level folder called “ft-archive” in your Drive.
2. A Google Maps visualization is automatically created with the archived data. This map preserves many of the original Fusion Tables styling configurations. Any changes you make to the Sheet or CSV will appear in the map visualization.
3. A listing of all archived tables is stored in a Sheet. This handy Sheet is called “ft-archive-index” and lives within the “ft-archive” folder. The index Sheet summarizes each run of the archive tool and preserves the visualization URLs with encoded styles. Each time you run the archive tool, you will get additional archives based on the current data in your tables along with corresponding new rows in the archive directory.

You can preview a map visualization in the archive tool, and when you’re ready to share, generate a code snippet to embed your map. If you want to embed the map on your site, you must get an API key. If you’re a journalist or nonprofit, you may be eligible for free or reduced cost usage. Finally, certain features of Fusion Tables, notably geocoding, will not be supported by this tool — see this FAQ for more limitations and known issues.

The archive tool takes advantage of deck.gl, an open source data visualization library specifically designed for mapping. At this year’s Google I/O, we announced deck.gl support for the Maps JavaScript API, offering custom, high-performance data visualization. To learn more, see the documentation for deck.gl’s Google Maps module.

(Left) Map created with Fusion Tables; (right) map created with new archive tool

As mentioned, we’ve open sourced the export and visualization code. The export code will stop working on December 3, when Fusion Tables shuts down. The visualizer will continue to be available for at least a year after this date. There are guides on how to deploy and host your own version of the tool in the GitHub repo.

These and other tools — including BigQuery, Cloud SQL, and Data Studio — provide newer, more specialized alternatives to Fusion Tables, from data storage to mapping. We encourage you to explore these alternatives as you transition off Fusion Tables.