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. Your camera already wrote a coarse place-stamp into most of your travel photos. An app can read just that stamp, not the picture, and fill the map in for you.

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 just 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 Flags helps

Flags: Countries Visited Map reads each photo's date and coarse place information and matches it to a country, then lets you add anything your photos missed by hand. Its App Store listing describes no account, cloud or GPS tracking, and sharing means exporting a clean image of your map. See how many countries have I visited to start with your own number.