Photo Route Map

After a trip the photos sit in the order they were taken, but the map in your head has already faded: which beach was that, how far was the walk between the two temples, were we really at the summit before noon? Phones write the GPS position and the time into every photo, and this tool turns a folder of them into a route: numbered points joined in shooting order, with the distance, the time gap and the average speed between each pair, the altitude where the phone recorded it, and a red arrow for the direction the camera was facing. The same view answers more sober questions too, such as whether a set of site photos really covers the whole plot or in what sequence an inspection was walked.

Use the original files. Anything that has been through a messenger or a social network has had its position removed, and some photo pickers strip it as well: on Android choose the files through 'Browse' or a file manager rather than the gallery picker, and on an iPhone check that Location is switched on under Options when you select them. A photo without a position but with a time is placed between its neighbours in proportion to the time gap and drawn as a hollow point; one without either is listed and left out, and photos without a timestamp go to the end of the route. Each leg is read as stayed, on foot, by vehicle or by air from its average speed, a multi-day trip gets a colour and a filter per day, and the finished map can be saved as a PNG. Distances are straight lines between consecutive photos, so a winding road is under-counted and the speed is an average over the gap. Treat both as a lower bound rather than a track log.

The photos never leave your browser; the route is drawn from their metadata alone, on a blank background. If you want streets and place names under it, 'Load map background' fetches map tiles of that area from OpenStreetMap, which does tell their servers roughly where you are looking, so the button is yours to press rather than automatic; the same goes for 'Look up place names', which sends the coordinates of up to 25 points to OpenStreetMap's address service. The route can be downloaded as a GPX file for Google Earth, Strava or QGIS, with one waypoint per photo and timestamps where the camera recorded its time zone, or opened in Google Maps as a directions link, which takes at most eleven points and therefore an even selection of a longer route. For a single photo's position, the EXIF Viewer is the quicker tool.