TraviPix

The travel map hiding inside your photos

Every photo taken on a smartphone carries invisible information — EXIF metadata. TraviPix uses just two fields: GPS (latitude and longitude) and capture time. With those two, "where" and "when" are known, so dropping a pile of photos is all it takes to reconstruct a journey.

The EXIF is read with the exifr library, which handles JPEG, PNG, WebP, and iPhone's HEIC/HEIF directly. HEIC images are converted for display with heic2any (in-browser WASM, loaded on demand) — nothing leaves your device. Photos missing a GPS tag or a capture date are automatically excluded, and the count and reason for each exclusion are shown on screen.

The Blue Marble globe and great-circle arcs

The stage is a 3D globe textured with NASA's Blue Marble imagery. Photos are placed as pins in chronological order, and neighbouring pins are connected by great-circle arcs — the shortest path along the Earth's surface. Unlike a flat map projection, great-circle arcs trace curves close to real flight paths, so a Tokyo-to-New-York jump looks as far as it actually is.

Each pin floats the photo's thumbnail at its location. Hovering shows capture time only — raw latitude and longitude are deliberately kept off screen, so screenshots or exported videos won't leak precise coordinates even if photos near your home are included.

The camera-fly animation

Press play and the camera flies from the first pin to the last, following the great-circle arcs in order. The dwell per photo (how long the camera stays at each stop) and highlight time (how long it zooms into a pin) are adjustable with sliders — shorter for large batches, longer when each stop deserves attention.

You can drag the globe freely to rotate it and scroll to zoom even during playback. A continent dropdown (Asia, Europe, etc.) centers the view on the photo cluster within that region, handy when you want to zoom into a specific leg of the trip.

What happens inside MP4 export

Export uses the browser-native WebCodecs API (VideoEncoder) together with mp4-muxer. Each frame is captured from the globe's Canvas, H.264-encoded, and packed into an MP4 container.

Video length is determined automatically: one second of journey playback per photo plus a 3-second hold at the end (10 photos produce roughly a 13-second clip). Resolution matches the globe canvas — typically around 1080p on desktop. Progress is shown as a percentage during export.

• Chrome / Edge (latest) — works without issues
• Safari 16+ — works, though encoding may be slower than Chrome
• Firefox — WebCodecs is not supported, so export is unavailable; globe viewing and playback still work

Privacy by design: hiding coordinates

Photo EXIF can contain coordinates of sensitive places — your home, workplace, or school. TraviPix uses those coordinates only to position pins and never displays the raw latitude/longitude numbers on screen. Hover overlays show capture time only.

Neither the photos themselves nor their EXIF metadata are sent to Toolish servers or any external API. Parsing, HEIC conversion, thumbnail rendering, and video encoding all run locally in your browser.

Tips for a better result

A few pointers for making the most of your travelogue video.

• Curate your GPS-tagged photos — too many pins crowd the globe. Picking highlight shots from each destination keeps the route readable
• Watch HEIC batch sizes — HEIC-to-JPEG conversion runs in-browser WASM, so dozens of files take a while. Convert to JPEG beforehand if speed matters
• Frame the view before exporting — pause playback, rotate the globe to the angle you like, then export. That viewpoint becomes the video's opening shot
• Use the continent filter to zoom in — for a trip that stayed within one region (e.g. a Europe tour), selecting that continent enlarges the route so the movement is easier to follow