Lisbon & the Algarve
12 – 19 May 2024
8 days · 5 places · 412 photos · 640 km
Lisbon → Sintra → Évora → Lagos → Faro
- Maya
Rented the car in Évora on a whim and kept it for five days.
Coming to iPhone
Every photo library is secretly a travel journal.
Photo Footprints reads the dates and places already inside your photos and draws every trip you have taken. All of it on your phone, with nothing uploaded.
In a full library
- 122
- Trips
- 741
- Places
- 14
- Countries
- 12,541
- Photos
The one promise
Every pin is somewhere you actually stood.
A photo library is a messy witness. It holds screenshots, saved memes, and pictures other people sent you from places you have never been. Map all of it faithfully and you get a beautiful atlas of somebody else’s life.
So a photograph is treated as evidence rather than as truth. Only evidence that survives the check becomes a place on your map — and where the evidence genuinely contradicts itself, you are asked, never quietly relocated.
How it works
Three things happen, and none of them involve a server.
Read, verify, draw. The whole product is those three steps, run on the phone in your pocket while you wait a few seconds.
- IMG_4417.HEICRead
- Taken
- 14 May 2024 · 18:42 +01:00
- Where
- 38.7223, −9.1393
- Camera
- Apple iPhone 15 Pro
- Pixels
- never opened
Step one
It reads what is already there
Every photo your camera takes carries the moment and the coordinates. Photo Footprints reads those two fields and closes the file. The picture itself is never decoded, never copied, and never sent.
- Chicago14:02your camera · 61 photosLisbon15:10unrecognised camera · 42 photos
6,700 km in 68 minutes — impossible
Step two
Then it argues with itself
Forty-two photos say Lisbon on the 14th. Your own camera says Chicago that same afternoon. One of those is a picture somebody sent you — and the engine would rather ask than put you in Portugal.
Step three
And the map draws itself
Places within a few days of each other thread into a journey in time order. Drives snap to real roads, flights arc, and every trip ends with a shape that is only ever its own.
The verification engine
The hard part was never the map. It was the truth.
High-confidence photos never wait — obvious places appear, obvious junk is filtered. What reaches you is only the genuine contradictions, one card at a time.
Needs review
1 of 1
These 42 photos are geotagged Lisbon, 12–18 May — but your own verified photos put you in Chicago on the 14th.
Probably not your trip87%
Unrecognised camera · no photos of yours within two days · timeline conflict
Go on — press one. Every verdict also teaches the engine, so the next batch from that camera never has to ask.
A few trips
Every journey already has a shape.
The app holds no photographs of its own, so a trip card could easily have been the same grey rectangle six times over with different words in it. The line on each of these is the trip’s own route.
HomeChicago, Illinois
The Pacific Coast
3 – 9 August 2023
7 days · 7 places · 688 photos · 1,050 km
San Francisco → Half Moon Bay → Santa Cruz → Big Sur → Cambria → Santa Barbara → Los Angeles
Fog the whole first morning, then nothing but light.
Iceland, the ring road
9 – 18 September 2022
10 days · 7 places · 934 photos · 1,330 km
Reykjavík → Vík → Höfn → Egilsstaðir → Mývatn → Akureyri → Borgarnes
- Maya
- Tom
Tokyo to Osaka
28 March – 5 April 2023
9 days · 5 places · 1,207 photos · 610 km
Tokyo → Hakone → Kyoto → Nara → Osaka
Arrived four days early for the blossom and got it exactly wrong.
The Dolomites
16 – 22 July 2021
7 days · 4 places · 503 photos · 430 km
Venice → Cortina d'Ampezzo → Ortisei → Bolzano
- Maya
Southern Morocco
2 – 12 March 2019
11 days · 5 places · 771 photos · 1,180 km
Marrakesh → Aït Benhaddou → Ouarzazate → Merzouga → Fes
The Merzouga leg took the whole day and was worth every hour of it.
The atlas
A decade of travel, at one zoom level.
At world zoom the atlas is a constellation — every place you have been as a point of warm light, every long haul as an arc away from home. Choose a year and the rest of your life falls away.
- 8
- trips
- 41
- places
- 7
- countries
- 5,045
- photos
Privacy
Nothing leaves your phone.
This is not a policy position, it is the architecture. The pipeline that finds your trips runs on the device, against the photo library that is already there, and there is no step in it where anything is sent anywhere.
What it reads
- The moment a photo was taken, and how far that clock sits from UTC
- The latitude and longitude already written inside the file
- The camera that took it — the signal that separates your photos from someone else’s
- Whether it arrived from a camera, a message, a screenshot or a download
What it never does
- Upload a photograph. Not the original, not a copy, not a thumbnail
- Ask you to make an account, or learn who you are
- Keep a record on a server of anywhere you have been
- Load an analytics script, a tracker, or a third-party SDK
There is no account to make and no server to trust, which also means there is nothing here for anyone to lose. A map of everywhere you have ever been is among the most sensitive things a person owns — the safest place to keep it is the device it was already on. Read the whole policy.
Questions
The honest answers.
Does it work if my photos live in iCloud?
Yes. The date and location are read from the Photos database on the device, which is there whether or not the full-resolution image has been offloaded. Nothing is pulled back down from iCloud to build your map.
Do I have to pick which photos to import?
No — that was the whole reason to build a native app rather than a website. Grant access once and the entire library maps itself, and every photo you take afterwards is added on its own.
What happens to photos with no location?
They are held aside rather than guessed at. If one was taken inside the dates of a trip you already have, it can be attached to that trip without ever claiming an exact spot on the map.
A trip is missing. Why?
The bar is set deliberately at precision over recall. A missing pin is a shrug; a pin somewhere you have never been breaks the only promise the product makes. You can always add a place by hand, and it counts fully towards your trips and your countries.
Is there an Android or web version?
Not yet. Everything here depends on reading the photo library directly on the device it is stored on, and that is a genuinely different piece of work on each platform. The iPhone app is the one being finished.
What happens if I delete the app?
Your map goes with it. There is no copy anywhere else, because there was never anywhere else — that is the trade the whole product is built on. Your photographs, of course, are untouched.
Coming to iPhone.
It is being finished now. If you want an early build when TestFlight opens, say so — the mail reaches a person, and your address is used for exactly that and nothing else.
Ask for a TestFlight invite
No account · nothing uploaded · iOS 18+