Is there a Schengen calculator app that tracks your days automatically?
Most Schengen day-counters make you type every trip or track your location. Flags reads the dates already in your photos — on-device, no GPS, nothing uploaded — and shows days used out of 90.
Short answer: yes — Flags: Schengen Calculator tracks your 90/180 days automatically by reading the dates your camera already wrote into your photos, entirely on your iPhone. No location permission, no account, nothing sent to a server.
If you have ever tried to keep the 90/180 rule in a spreadsheet, you know the problem: it is only as good as your memory, and the rolling 180-day window means a single forgotten travel day makes your "safe" number wrong. Most apps that promise to fix this do one of two things you may not want: make you type every trip by hand, or track your location in the background.
A different approach: your photos already hold the answer
You almost certainly took a photo on most days of every trip. Each photo carries metadata — a timestamp and, usually, a coarse place tag your camera recorded. Flags reads just those two things:
- It scans your library once and groups photos by date.
- It works out which country each day was in using offline maps bundled in the app — a point-in-polygon lookup, no network call, no reverse-geocoding service.
- It turns that into Schengen days and walks the rolling 180-day window for you.
The photos themselves are never read or uploaded. There is no GPS permission, no background location, no "anonymous diagnostics". The only permission it asks for is photo access, and the reason string says it plainly: nothing leaves your phone.
Confidence, gaps and manual entry
Real travel histories are messy, so the app is honest about certainty:
- Days backed by several photos are marked high confidence; a single photo is medium; days inferred to bridge a 1–7 day gap between the same country are low.
- Where you have no photos at all, you add a stay by hand — country and dates — and it sits alongside the automatic days.
- The Data view flags days in your window that have no record yet, so you can fill them before they trip you up.
What you actually see
Open the app and the first thing is your number: days used out of 90, colour-coded — green is safe, amber is close, red is over. The Planning tab answers the other question travellers ask — does this trip fit, and if not, what is the earliest date it would? — down to the day.
Honest limits
It is a tool, not legal advice; border officers decide. Photo metadata can be stripped by some cloud-sync or chat apps, and border-region locations occasionally need a manual correction — both of which the app lets you fix. But for the job people actually fail at — keeping an accurate running count — it does the work so you can open it, see your number, and carry on.