The Map That Finally Left the Folder

I tap the route line across Italy, and up come the photos I took closest to that spot: Verona, the Palazzo della Ragione. One more tap, this time on the route to San Sebastián, and there’s La Concha beach in the pictures. All of it opens from a button in Telegram, in the same chat I drop reels into.

I already had almost everything behind that button. Over the summer an AI went through my 7,915 screenshots and 67,608 family photos and made some beautiful maps, which then just sat in a folder. The hard part was not the analysis but the last mile: the road from a finished map to a place where I run into it without trying.

TL;DR

• The maps from the summer now live in Telegram, in a mini app called Finds: 591 places, 50 trips, 6,345 of my photos, plus steps and tracks from my watch.
• A bot built the app in a day while I just talked to it. I didn’t write any code.
• Google Timeline is great at collecting data and dull at showing it, and it has nothing from before you switch it on.
• The lesson for companies: what matters is not clever analysis but where the data lives and how many taps it takes to get an answer.

Gathering dust

The first post got me a map of 192 places from screenshots, the second an atlas of trips from photos, the third a lesson that a geotag remembers the camera, not the person. All of it sits in a folder. And a map you have to go and open loses to a window that is open all day anyway. For me, that window is Telegram.

A button right in the chat

On Sunday, 11 October, I gave one of my bots the job of handling reels and named it Breakdown. The same day I asked it to build an app, and at 15:20 a Finds button showed up in the chat. By that night the map had the routes and my photos on it, and by Monday morning the trips from my father’s list. I didn’t write the code: I said what I wanted, looked at what came back, asked for fixes. A reel I drop into the chat lands on the map a few minutes later.

Five questions for the map

Every screen answers a question I ask myself.

An AI agent recorded these clips from a script, and photos with people in them were taken out before recording.

Walks up close

Three cities, each day in its own colour. The solid line is the watch track, the dots are where I took pictures, the dashed line is me walking between them. If two shots are more than 900 metres or 40 minutes apart, I most likely rode that stretch, so there’s no dashed line there.

Prague, 22-24 September 2025. The 22 September track: 4.7 km through the Old Town and over the Mánes Bridge to Hradčany. 58 km over the three days.

Istanbul, 3-5 January 2025. The 3 January track: 9 km from Beyoğlu to the Blue Mosque and back.

Amsterdam, 25-27 March 2025. The 26 March track: 3.4 km along the canals.

My phone and watch count steps all the time, and from April 2024 on I have them for 11 trips.

A second witness

In July the photos credited me with a safari in Madagascar, where I have never been. Now the map has a second witness with no GPS at all: the list of our trips abroad that my father sent over in 2022. The cross-check worked both ways.

The most useful part is where the witnesses disagree. A company usually has a second witness already, it just never gets called: for the CRM it’s the invoices, for orders it’s the warehouse.

What about Google Timeline?

Timeline collects data better than anything else: it records every day on its own, no photos needed. But it’s dull to look at: Google has the data, it just doesn’t seem to have designers. On the bright side, you can export your timeline from Google Maps as a single file, and then Timeline becomes just the collector while I do the looking in Finds. Apple Photos and Polarsteps each have their own tricks, but neither keeps the past, plans and finds in one window.

The lesson for anyone doing analytics

It’s an uncomfortable lesson, and it applies to me too. A report in a folder and the same report in the chat where the team spends all day are two different products with the same content. I’d start any data project by asking which window people will see the answer in, and how many taps it takes to get there.

There are weak spots too. New photos don’t reach the map on their own yet, and places from old screenshots may have closed. And I don’t know if I’ll still be opening Finds three months from now. If I’m still going in once a week come January, then it came down to the last mile. If not, there will be a fifth post.

What’s next

My father’s list has no trips inside Russia. Most of the old trips don’t have a single photo of mine, so their cards use pictures from Wikipedia. The next step is my parents’ photo archive, about two terabytes: I’ll match it against the map by date and see how many childhood trips it brings back. Steps and tracks only go back to April 2024 for now. A full Apple Health export will add steps to the older trips as well.