Maplapse: How Thousands of Photos Become the Map of Your Trips

There are thousands of photos on my iPhone. Somewhere among them is that short trip from three years ago, but finding it means minutes of scrolling. You don't always remember the place or the exact time. Often you only know roughly when it was. Maplapse groups your photos by places that are not your home and that belong together in time and location. That way, a list of holidays and short trips appears with hardly any effort on your part.

The idea: find your trips instead of scrolling

Every photo on an iPhone knows when and where it was taken, if the Camera may use Location Services. Maplapse reads these two details from the library you already have and detects trips in them. A trip is a time when you were away from home. You set your home once, and everyday photos then no longer show up as a trip.

The result is a Trips list: the summer holiday, the long weekend, the day out from years ago. Nobody has to tag or sort anything, and the app works retroactively. Trips that happened long before you installed it appear on the map right away.

As mentioned, there is one prerequisite: Maplapse needs photos with a location. If the Camera had no access to Location Services, that detail is missing, and the photo does not appear on the map, or no trip can be detected.

What the app does

Every trip appears as a route on the map, with numbered stops in the order you visited them. Zoom in on a stop and it splits into sub-stops, for example the beach, the old town and the campsite or hotel of a single day. One tap shows the photos taken at that place.

Without a subscription, Maplapse already offers a lot:

• detect trips and stops automatically, with a map and a Trips list
• add a note to every stop, with simple formatting
• play a trip as a slideshow, with your photos, the map and your notes; three trips play from start to finish without Pro
• send a trip as a link so family or friends can watch it as a slideshow; three links are free without Pro
• search for places, trip names or dates such as “May 2024”, with the results landing straight on the map
• mark the photos you love with a heart and hide single photos that don't belong on the map

Maplapse Pro is a subscription and lifts the limits on slideshows and links. It also adds sync between your own devices through your own iCloud, an advanced search that also looks inside your notes, and assigning photos without a location afterwards. The assign wizard handles that: it shows the photos without a location from around the time of a stop, and you take over the location of a matching photo. With Pro you can also share your whole Maplapse with others. That always includes all your trips, and single trips cannot be picked. Since this feature is mostly something for families with a Shared iCloud Photo Library, Maplapse Pro also works with Apple Family Sharing. That way only the family organiser has to buy Pro.

The workshop: everything stays on the device

Now to the part that occupied me most as a software developer. Travel photos reveal a lot: where someone lives, when they were away and who they were with. So from the start I knew that I did not want to have this data!

That is why Maplapse analyses your photos entirely on your device. There is no Maplapse server that receives or stores photos, travel data or notes. The app contains no trackers and no ads.

Anyone who wants to sync or share a trip switches that on deliberately. By default, all of it is off. Maplapse itself then sends data only to the user's own iCloud. A link is created there as well: the photos travel along as smaller copies in the sender's iCloud, not through a server at maplapse.de. A single photo can also be passed on through the iOS share sheet, just as in other apps.

What this means for the technology

Without a server of its own, the device has to do all the work, even with a library of many thousands of photos.

The first analysis of a large library takes a while. So Maplapse works trip by trip, newest first, and every finished trip appears on the map at once with all its stops. An hourglass in the Trips list shows which trips may still gain photos. Unfortunately this takes a little time, because an Apple service turns the coordinates into place names.

Heavy computations run in the background so the map stays responsive. And because photos often live only in iCloud, the app has to cope with a photo that is still loading. The full-screen view therefore loads the photo you are looking at first, at the resolution of your screen, and the original once you zoom in.

What comes next

The to-do list is still long. It includes, for example:

• “On this day” memories and a Home Screen widget
• correct the location of photos with wrong or inaccurate location data
• include videos when sharing a trip by link

And those are just a few of them.

If you try Maplapse, I would be glad to hear your honest feedback, whether as a message to me or as a review on the App Store.

You can find more about the app and the way to the App Store on the Maplapse product page.