Mapsake Journal
Practical guides and behind-the-scenes thinking about travel photos, personal location data, privacy, maps, and building a travel record that lasts.
Mapsake guide
Connect Mapsake with ChatGPT, Claude, or a compatible self-hosted AI to ask travel questions, confirm safe changes, and disconnect access.
August 24, 2026 · 8 minute read
More field notes
Travel planning guide
Calculate great-circle distance for direct and multi-city flights, compare miles, kilometers, and nautical miles, and understand actual flight mileage.
August 18, 2026 · 4 minute read
Engineering journal
How Mapsake turns generalized photo locations into private, synchronized Maplight coverage with geohashes, equal-area cells, and land boundaries.
August 11, 2026 · 6 minute read
Photo mapping guide
Check whether a photo contains GPS coordinates, understand missing or incorrect EXIF data, and map files privately in your browser.
August 4, 2026 · 5 minute read
Product update
Meet Maplight, explore your photo-covered world year by year, and discover 40 new travel achievements in the free Mapsake 1.9 update.
July 28, 2026 · 6 minute read
iPhone photo guide
Learn why some iPhone photos have no location, how to check and fix missing GPS metadata in Apple Photos, and how to prevent future gaps.
July 21, 2026 · 11 minute read
iPhone photo guide
Learn how to search iPhone photos by location, date, year, camera model, map area, favorites, and more with Apple Photos and Mapsake.
July 20, 2026 · 11 minute read
Engineering update
How Mapsake built private photo search and visual Constellations, then used a deterministic benchmark suite to make large travel libraries dramatically faster.
July 11, 2026 · 13 minute read
Developer journal
A developer look at Mapsake's approachable on-device engineering for calendar memories, return-trip photo pairs, and assistive passport-stamp scanning.
July 9, 2026 · 11 minute read
Product update
Mapsake adds around 160 private travel achievements and a mutual Friends experience for comparing maps, Passports, places, and progress.
July 4, 2026 · 10 minute read
Product update
Mapsake's biggest update so far brings first-class Immich photo import and sync together with a richer, shareable Travel Passport.
June 27, 2026 · 11 minute read
Photo mapping
A practical guide to checking iPhone photo locations, turning them into a private travel map, reviewing the result, and filling the gaps.
June 20, 2026 · 4 minute read
Engineering journal
An engineering look at Mapsake's offline GeoNames and SQLite gazetteer, Natural Earth boundary lines, reverse geocoding, and border correctness.
June 17, 2026 · 12 minute read
What belongs here
Every article is written from the product, engineering, and travel-data work behind Mapsake. Sources are linked where they help, product boundaries are stated directly, and dates change only when the article materially changes.
How dates, coordinates, devices, and imperfect metadata become a travel map worth trusting.
Clear explanations of local processing, imports, sharing, backups, and the tradeoffs behind them.
Design and engineering notes from making one travel record work across every Apple screen.
Independent and readable
The Journal publishes when there is a useful guide, original result, or product lesson worth keeping.