Mapsake: Photo Travel Map

BETTER TRIP CAPSULE COVERS Drag, zoom, rotate, and straighten a cover to get the composition just right. Your framing syncs with the trip across devices. CLEARER ICLOUD STATUS Mapsake now shows when system or account settings prevent syncing, explains the current storage and transfer state, and links to settings or opt-in diagnostics. MORE RELIABLE TRIPS Repeat visits remain separate, overlapping photo data no longer creates duplicate stops, complete date ranges stay visible, and meaningful destinations appear first. Vatican City photos also stay attributed correctly. MORE CONTROL OVER PHOTO IMPORTS Choose specific Apple Photos albums, keep device-specific automation settings on the device where they were enabled, and optionally recover missing camera names from iCloud. THANK YOU, ANDREAS Thanks to Andreas for the detailed examples and testing that helped make these fixes possible.

REMINDERS ON YOUR SCHEDULE Choose whether On This Day sends notifications, the delivery time, and the days of the week. RESUMABLE PHOTO MAPPING Large Apple Photos and Immich scans now save checkpoints as they run. If Mapsake closes, you can continue from your saved progress when you return. The minimized progress bubble also follows your finger smoothly while you move it. MORE CONTROL OVER YOUR HISTORY Hide a trip from Travel History without removing its map data, restore it later from Manage Data, or explicitly remove the trip's places and visit history. You can also remove inaccessible cached photo records from Mapsake without changing Apple Photos.

• Share your map on the web: Publish a private link anyone can open in a browser, no app needed. Choose what shows (globe, 2D map, passport, achievements), pick your own custom link, add a password or an end date, and turn it off anytime. It is off by default, and your photos never leave your device. • See how rare your travels are: Your Passport now scores how off the beaten path you are, from Common up to Legendary, with your rarest places highlighted and the full list ranked by rarity. • Make the globe your own: Give the globe, passport, and place stories a fresh look with new styles like Night Lights, Terrain, Blueprint, Parchment, and Vaporwave, mix your own colors, pick a one-tap palette, and tune the glow. • Friends, made friendlier: Your friends now sit as circles at the top of the Friends tab, so you can open anyone's map in a tap. When you invite someone, choose how long the link stays valid (30 minutes to a year), see how you will appear, and rest easy that your photos stay on your device. • More accurate maps: Photos taken near a border now land in the right country and state (no more a photo from one state showing up in the next), and states and regions fill the correct area on your map. • Tidy up your map: Exempt a stray photo from a place you only passed near, so it stops counting toward your map.

• Scan your passport stamps: Photograph a stamp and we'll suggest the country, the date, and even the airport you arrived at. Add the point of entry, mark arrivals or departures, and file each one in a passport book. You can also scan your passport's photo page to set up a book in seconds. Your photos always stay in your own library. • Your stamp collection, beautifully organized: See every stamp grouped by continent and country, as a playful stack of cards that fans open when you tap it. Share a gorgeous card for a whole continent or a single country, and blur out anything private with a censor brush first. • Even more places on your map: We added hundreds of thousands more towns and villages, so even small border towns and out of the way spots get found and added to your travels. • Sharper region highlighting: Regions now light up wherever you actually took photos, not just near the biggest city, so a capital or a border district you visited shows up correctly. A new "Re-scan places from photos" in Settings, under Advanced, rebuilds your map against the latest maps and shows you exactly what changed.

This update is all about polish, with fixes for the things you told us about. Thank you for writing in. • You're all caught up: When you import from Photos and every located photo is already on your map, you'll now see a friendly "you're all caught up" instead of a puzzling "no located places." A Re-scan all photos button sits right there if you ever want to rebuild your map from scratch. • Every airport, start to finish: The airport list for large countries like the United States used to stop partway through the alphabet. Now every airport shows up, so you can find and mark exactly the one you need. • Fixes for the Mac app: Opening a country or place from the map now has a clear close button, so the details window no longer gets stuck, and online extras like Wikipedia place info and bringing in photos from services like Immich now load instead of being blocked. • Easier help with Friends: When you send feedback, you can now include friends diagnostics, your sharing state plus a live check of whether your map and your friends' maps are reachable, so issues like a friend not seeing your map are far easier to solve. Place names are included, but never your photos.

This is our biggest update yet. Your travels become a personality, a replay, and a set of rediscovered memories. Everything is computed on your device, and nothing is ever uploaded. • Meet your Travel DNA: Your places become a travel personality. Six traits are scored from your own map, from how far you roam to how high you climb, and matched to a named archetype like Globe-Trotter or Summit Seeker, with a one-of-a-kind helix to match. Find it on your Profile, watch it reveal itself, and share it as a Story or Square card. It even recolors live with your lens colors. • Rewind your map: Watch your map draw itself in the order it grew, country by country, year by year. Scrub back to any moment ("your map as of 2015"), then create a video of the whole journey to share. • Then & Now: Your photo library holds pairs of photos taken in the same spot, years apart. Mapsake finds them and puts them side by side, a before and after of your own life. Look for the new tile on your Profile. • Almost There: See which countries would unlock the most on your map right now, the achievements they complete and the continents they finish. Your next trip just got more interesting. Find it at the top of Achievements.

Your map, around the clock. This update adds two new ways to see your travels, plus dozens of refinements everywhere else. As always, everything is computed on your device, and nothing is ever uploaded. • Body Clock: The jet-lag ledger of your life. Three new passport cards tally the hours of jet lag you have collected, the time zones you have crossed, your longest day on record, and the hour bands of Earth you have stood in. Find them in your Passport and share them like any other card. • Ambient Atlas: Your world as living artwork. The glowing globe drifts while your memories, stats, and places fade through, with a clock so it doubles as a display. The view rotates on its own between your lenses, the combined view, and data heatmaps. Turn it on from Settings on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, or open the new Ambient tab on Apple TV. • Polish everywhere: Smoother animations across the app (photos fade in gently, the import flow cross-fades, the globe blends into the flat map), light mode fixes, snappier screens including instant achievements search, tidier layouts on iPad and Mac, fuller localization in Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese, and clear confirmations before anything is deleted. Animations respect Reduce Motion, and when new achievements unlock you can now tap any of them in the celebration to open the details.

Your places, connected. This update introduces Constellations, the biggest addition to Mapsake yet, and makes the whole app dramatically faster. As always, everything is computed on your device, and nothing is ever uploaded. • Constellations: Mapsake privately studies the photos on your map and discovers the connections between distant places: the doorways, coastlines, light, and seasons you keep returning to. Chart your sky and watch each constellation form live, then explore the night sky your travels leave behind. • Match-cut cinema: Tap Play on any connection to watch its photos dissolve into one another full screen, one place becoming the next, centered on what you photographed. • Much faster: Rebuilding your map from photos is now many times faster, even for libraries with tens of thousands of photos, so changing photo filters or opening your Places browser no longer keeps you waiting. Discovering constellations, importing, and photo lookups are quicker too, and moving between tabs is smoother and lighter on memory. • Sharper city regions: Photos taken in capital regions like Berlin, Seoul, and Kyiv now always count toward the city itself instead of sometimes landing in the surrounding region. • Polish everywhere: Settings reorganized into four clear hubs, a refreshed feature tour that covers everything Mapsake can do now, tidier Profile layouts, and refinements across every screen.

Your photos, organized. Mapsake 1.7 introduces Photo Explorer: a private, on-device way to search, organize, and rediscover the photos behind your travel map. • Find any mapped photo by place, date, camera, source, elevation, speed, screenshot, edit, private note, tag, rating, or color label. • Search naturally—try “favorite photos from Italy in 2024.” Typo-tolerant search works everywhere; on supported devices, private on-device intelligence understands more flexible requests. • Favorite photos globally or feature them for a specific city, region, airport, or country. Add searchable photo and location notes. • Browse automatic trips and place collections, search an area on the map, save searches, revisit history, compare photos, and follow a travel timeline. • Review safe suggestions for photos missing a location, then choose whether to add it to Apple Photos. • Much faster photo matching makes large-library imports, map rebuilds, Photo Explorer, and constellation discovery finish sooner. • Improved source reconciliation keeps photo-derived maps, stats, memories, and constellations accurate as indexed media changes. • Backups now include your photo favorites, notes, tags, ratings, labels, and saved searches—never the photos themselves. Everything stays private and local-first. No ads, no account, no tracking, and no analytics. Your travels. Your photos. Your map.

Photo Explorer turns your mapped photo library into a private, searchable travel archive. Find photos by place, year, camera, notes, elevation, speed, source, and more; search in everyday language; browse smart collections, a map, and a timeline; save searches; and add private favorites, notes, tags, ratings, and labels. Passport cards and globe and Rewind videos are now easier to share. After a successful import, you can add a widget or invite a friend directly from the celebration. This release also adds the Mapsake Journal and official social links to About.

Build your first private travel map from Photos with one clear step. Photo Explorer searches mapped photos by place, year, camera, notes, elevation, speed, source, and more, all on your device. Your timeline is now an editable trip journal. Name trips, add notes and date ranges, choose local cover photos, split or merge stops, and share a polished Trip Capsule. Trip details and compact covers are included in Mapsake backups. Atlas Digest adds your choice of important discoveries, weekly travel-memory roundups, daily On This Day reminders, or no notifications. Website links can also open Photo Explorer and supported imports directly in Mapsake. Manage Data now confirms whether iCloud sync is available and clearly explains which data syncs between devices and which stays local. Trips, trip cover choices, exclusions, Photo Explorer notes, favorites and searches, and app settings now follow you between devices through iCloud. Mapsake syncs your organization, never your photos or other source files.

YOUR PHOTOS LIGHT UP THE WORLD Maplight turns your photo history into a private fog-covered globe. Photos and Immich reveal permanent places without background GPS. Explore estimated land coverage, countries, origins, sources, yearly history, Passport cards, widgets, Watch and Apple TV views, and a shareable Maplight reel. 40 NEW ACHIEVEMENTS Discover geographic, photo, and history milestones across South America, the Gulf and Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, Oceania, and the wider world. New achievements use your places and photo metadata, never Trips. MORE COMPLETE ICLOUD SYNC Trips, exclusions, Photo Explorer notes, favorites and searches, app settings, and private Maplight origins now follow you between devices without uploading your photos.

A MORE DETAILED ATLAS Switch between Countries, Regions, and Cities to explore your travels at the right level of detail. CITIES ON THE ATLAS Manually added, imported, and photo-derived cities now appear as clustered markers. Tap a city to open its story. THANK YOU, ANDREAS Thanks to Andreas for suggesting these Atlas improvements and helping make Mapsake better.

FLAGS FOR EVERY TRIP STOP Trip stops now pair each city with its current country flag and country name, making multi-country journeys easier to scan. PICK PLACES ON THE ATLAS Choose Add on the Atlas, zoom to a city or town, and tap the map to add it without searching. Add stays active for back-to-back places, and you can choose the city you meant when several are nearby. CONSISTENT TAB TITLES Passport, Friends, and Profile now use centered titles aligned with their toolbar buttons. SMOOTHER STARTUP The animated launch screen now stays smooth while the live Atlas prepares behind it. THANK YOU, ANDREAS Thanks to Andreas for the thoughtful feedback and mockup behind these improvements.