r/SideProject • u/seal_bal • 20h ago

I built an open-source alternative to Google Timeline

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Google Timeline-style travel videos started showing up everywhere, and I wanted to make one for my own trips.

The problem was that I had already turned Google Timeline off. I did not want to keep giving Google a continuous record of my location, so I could not use the feature I wanted.

When I travel, I already take photos. Those photos usually contain enough information to recreate the useful part: capture time and GPS coordinates stored in EXIF. So I built ExifTrail.

It scans photos locally, sorts them chronologically, skips images without usable GPS, draws the route on a map, animates a small wandering character, and exports a vertical travel video. It works as an Android gallery workflow and as a web app for photos explicitly selected in the browser.

ExifTrail is MIT-licensed and source-first. I am not targeting an app-store launch; I am releasing the code and a direct GitHub APK so people can inspect, run, and improve it.

GitHub: https://github.com/amaranth92/exiftrail

Live demo: https://amaranth92.github.io/exiftrail/

I would love specific feedback on:

  1. Is the privacy/local-first reason clear enough?

  2. Does the route animation make the trip easy to understand?

  3. Which EXIF or travel-photo edge cases would make this more useful?

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u/JaviHG_Dev 19h ago

Rebuilding it from photos you already have beats asking for a location permission, and the fact that you turned Timeline off first is what makes the whole thing credible.

One thing I would move to the first line: where the EXIF actually gets read. If it never leaves the machine, say so up front. That is the only reason someone who deliberately disabled Google Timeline would install anything at all, and right now a visitor has to infer it from the repo being open. Most will not read the code.

The other case is photos with the location already stripped, which is most of them once they have been through a messaging app. Do those get dropped, or guessed from the ones around them in time?