Frequent travelers who want to track their trips and reminisce about their favorite spots and travel memories now have a new app to do so. Globetrotter is today introducing a location-based travel photos app that lets you look back on your past travels and share your memories and stats out to other social apps, like Instagram and others. In addition to sharing your travel highlights and looking back on past trips, Globetrotter also has a feature called “2023 Wrapped,” which leverages the popularity of Spotify Wrapped to showcase your travels for the year, in a similar “year in review” format.
The new app was created by indie developer Shihab Mehboob, who had previously run the third-party Twitter client Aviary and later developed the initial version of the Mastodon app Mammoth. As the latter is now in new hands, Mehboob had time to work on a new project. He said the idea of building a travel app appealed to him because he also enjoys taking photos on his trips and wanted a way to look back at his past travels in a new way.
“I travel a lot and take a lot of photos in those places, so it made sense for me to make something that helps me with this use case,” Mehboob explains. “It’s very useful for looking back at memories, and the map makes it really quick and easy. Being able to quickly see what happened on a specific day x years ago is also something I’ve always wanted to quickly see myself,” he told TechCrunch.
In Globetrotter, the app will show you travel highlights for both the U.S. and the world, like the percentage of the world traveled, with a breakdown of how many continents and countries were visited. There’s also a scratch map of the world where you can track the countries you’ve visited and a card of metrics that can be shared out to Instagram Stories.
For remembering past trips, a memories page will resurface old photos from prior travels, including a photo from a year ago, when available, or a random memory, if not. These, too, can be shared on your Instagram Stories.
In another shareable feature, you can browse your photos pinned to a map and track both the countries visited and the U.S. states you’ve traveled to. As you travel, you’ll collect flags and Apple Maps 3D Landmarks from the places you’ve gone. You can even look back on your event routes for any particular travel day to see where you went, based on photos pinned to an in-app maps interface. Like everything else, this feature is also shareable.
The app includes a social element, too, where you can add friends and then compete on a travel leaderboard which shows your statistics.
Given the sensitive nature of your location history, it’s worth noting that Globetrotter says no data is sent to its servers, as everything takes place on the device. The app also doesn’t leverage any third-party APIs, which could lead to data leaks.
To sustain itself, the app has subscription tiers available starting at one week for $2.99, or one year for $29.99 with one-week free trial. For regular travelers, there’s also a $79.99 lifetime one-time purchase option.
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