How to delete your content (Automated solution)

Hello

Contributing content is way more enjoyable if you know you can easily undo them. I’ve seen so negative feedback about my content that it is the safest option for me to delete all my contributions. On top of that I have personal reasons.

Anyways, in my opinion there should be an easy way of to delete content. And I don’t want to delete everything. I have over 2000 photos so manually deleting them is not an option, that’s why I created very inefficient script to move the mouse for me and delete my content. I tried to make it as easy as possible, so it is a shell script which works on Linux computers. You can copy the script from below and you likely have to adjust it to your needs, but you can quite easily find bash scripting tutorials.


#!/bin/bash

The line above should tell the computer how this script has to be processed

This is a very inefficient way to automate the deletion of google maps contributions - but hey,

it is automatic and works if you don’t have portrait photos

it works by just moving the cursor and then clicking the delete button on a browser window and then refreshes the page after each deletion

this script utilizes xdotool and whatever browser you have so install them first, then remember to set the positions on screen according to your setup

echo “deletion begins in 3”
sleep 1
echo “2”
sleep 1
echo “1”
sleep 1

echo “starting”

this sets how many times the deletion has to be done

for i in {1…2000}
do
echo “Let’s delete another…”

#set the mousemove screen coordinates according to your computer

you can get the current position by issuing command “xdotool getmouselocation --shell” without quotes

Move cursor to the three dots of the first image

xdotool mousemove 369 579;
xdotool click 1;

#click delete on the opened menu
xdotool mousemove 430 593;
xdotool click 1;
sleep 1;

#confirm delete automatically
echo “it may press enter here if you did read the comments and uncommented the deletion part of the script”;

uncomment the next line if you know what you are doing

#xdotool key Return;
sleep 3;

real loop

refresh page - this is necessary because it will make the next image appear full width

so the delete button will be on the same position as the previous one

you may have to adjust the sleep time according to your internet speed

xdotool key ctrl+shift+r;
sleep 3.8;

echo “done”
done


This is far from perfect but I hope it helps someone. Stay safe while mapping!

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