Exporting Points of Interest from Ingress

This blog post talks about how you can export portal data from Ingress using browser addons.

What data can you get from Ingress?

The Ingress map allows you to see the current state of the world in Ingress. This shows both the state of all the portals and the links created between them.

This map is incredibly useful to plan where you are going to field. In addition you are able to extract data such as the positions of portals.

This can be useful for offline analysis and is also helpful in Pokemon Go. This is because roughly the portals correspond to Pokestops and Gyms in Pokemon Go.

By exporting this data from Ingress you can then use it to supplement other pages.

How to export the data

Before exporting the data from Ingress you will need to create an Ingress account. Once done this will let you use intel.ingress.com to view portal data.

To create the account you will need to download Ingress to your phone and log in via Facebook or Google. Once the account is created you will be able to log into the Intel site.

To export the data we are going to use the “Ingress Intel Total Conversion” user script alongside the “Ingress Portal CSV Export” plugin.

To use these first download a user script runner. For chrome Tampermonkey is quite a nice extension, other browsers will have similar extensions.

Once installed, download both IITC and Portal CSV Export user scripts and add them to Tampermonkey.

Once installed this will radically change intel.ingress.com and will allow exporting of the data.

To the right of the screen you should now see the Portal CSV Exporter window. To start data export you can press this Start button. Once pressed any area you view in ingress will have its portals captured and buffered to a file.

To begin exporting data you need to zoom into level 15 or higher as this is the level all portals will appear. Once you move to an area it will download and buffer all portals.

Once the area is scanned a green square will appear around the scanned area. You are free to move to another area which then the data will be downloaded and stored in the browser temporarily.

Once the full area is scanned the Scraper status will be “Area Scraped”.

At any time when you want to download the data the Download CSV button will let you export the data to a CSV. After pressing this the file will be offered for download.

Portal data exported

Once exported the CSV file will have a header and four columns.

These are Name, Latitude, Longitude and Image as shown above. The Name will be the name of the portal as it is in Ingress. The Latitude and Longitude identifies where the portal is precisely. The image field holds the link to the image that is used for the portal.

Summary

Using the Ingress Intel map and a few extensions you can export the portal data for a local area. This can data is exported in a single CSV format which then can be used for other projects.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask below.