A world map of places I've been, built from my photos

Most "world map of places I've been" tools fall into one of three camps. Knowing which you are choosing saves a lot of fiddling.

The three kinds of world map

• Tap-by-hand scratch maps. You colour in each country yourself. Private and simple, but slow, and it is easy to forget trips you took years ago.
• Location-tracking apps. These build the map from background GPS and a cloud account. Little effort to run, but you hand your live whereabouts and full travel history to someone else's server.
• Photo-derived maps. Every photo in your library already carries a date. An app can read that date and the place the photo stores, not the picture itself, and rebuild your trips so the map fills in from real evidence.

For a keepsake you will actually keep, the photo route gives you much of the completeness of tracking without surrendering your location.

What to look for in a places-visited map

If the map is meant to be a personal record, weigh it on these points.

• Where the data lives. On-device beats cloud. A map of your movements is sensitive and does not need to sit on a server.
• No account, no tracking. You should not have to sign up or grant location permission to draw past trips.
• Manual top-ups. Some old trips have no photos, so being able to add a country by hand keeps the map honest.
• A clean export. When you want to show someone, you should be able to share a picture of the map, never the underlying data.

The same checklist runs through what makes a travel map app private and keeping a travel record without GPS.

How Visited Countries helps

Visited Countries reads the dates and places in your photo library to rebuild your trips, then lets you add anything your photos missed by hand. Its App Store listing describes no account and no GPS tracking, optional sync uses your own private iCloud, and sharing means sending a stats card as an image, never your data. See how many countries have I visited to start with your own number.