Idea

What a year of travel looks like in thirty seconds

August 14, 2026 893 words

Most of the year-end recaps your apps generate suffer from the same problem: there is nothing of you in them. A film built from your own location history is different — but this time the decisions are yours.

Come December, every app on your phone shows you a year in review. Your most played song, the person you messaged most, your step count. Most are nicely designed and most are forgotten immediately, because there is nothing of you in them — a ranking, a chart, but no story.

A film built from location history works differently. What you are watching is not a statistic, it is the road you actually took. And on first viewing most people react the same way: “did I really go that far?”

The trick the numbers play

That happened with my own data. I estimated the year at somewhere around three thousand kilometres; it came out at 9,781. Not double my guess — triple.

The reason makes sense: we remember the long journeys and never count the short ones. A trip between two cities stays in mind, but a place visited every week for two months adds up to more than that and leaves no impression at all. The map shows it in one glance — the repeated line thickens, and the distance becomes visible.

The arithmetic of thirty seconds

Compress a year into thirty seconds and each second carries roughly three hundred kilometres. At that speed a city goes past in half a second. Knowing that decides the most important thing about how you build the film: choose the length to suit the content, not the other way round.

The most common mistake is selecting the whole year and giving it fifteen seconds. What you get is a line flickering on screen. The same year becomes watchable at thirty seconds, and at sixty even city detail survives.

But length is not always the fix. If six months of the year were spent in one city, no amount of time makes those six months interesting. The move there is not to lengthen the film but to remove them.

Dropping the empty months doubles the film

Most people’s years are not uniform. Two busy months, three middling ones, six almost stationary. Select the whole year and those six take half the video.

It gets much easier when you can see what each month carries. On the Wanderlapse settings screen there is one bar per month, as tall as the distance you covered in it. In my own data October and January come out at twice the height of everything else — those two months are the story of the year, and the rest is background.

Dragging across just that stretch improves the film in a single move. The narrative sharpens, the speed drops, and the places you pass become recognisable.

Rhythm: not every kilometre is equal

Spreading time evenly across distance is easy and the result is poor. A day spent in a city gets the same seconds as two hours of motorway — and the motorway, being straight, shows nothing, while the city is gone in a blink.

Better is to allocate time by how intricate the route is. The more a stretch winds, the more seconds it earns. In the samples we measured, a city centre comes out around four times denser than open motorway, and that is exactly what you feel watching: a coast road unfolds slowly, a motorway goes past.

It sounds like a small detail, but it is most of what makes the film watchable. An animation moving at a constant rate gets dull; one whose speed follows the content breathes.

The ending is the best three seconds

The strongest moment in a year-in-review is the last one. The camera pulls back and everywhere you went that year appears in a single frame. That is where a viewer says “wow”, and so do you.

Which is why the ending needs protecting. A camera that tightens again near the end kills the moment — the pull-back should be uninterrupted, and nothing should fall outside the final frame. Getting that right was harder than we expected; the last three seconds took more work than the rest of the camera logic.

About the title

The small card at the top of the film does real work. The date and distance are written for you; the title is your context. “Summer 2026” is fine. “Ring Road” is better. “The year I kept driving to see my mother” is best, because it turns the film from a statistic into a memory.

One note on sharing

A year-in-review also shows where you were living. The busiest knot in the route is usually home. If you are going to publish it, selecting a single trip range, or starting the film outside the city, removes most of that — and does not hurt the film, because the interesting part was always the journey in between.

A last practical warning: if auto-delete is on, going looking in December for last summer’s data may find it already gone. Exporting straight after a long trip is the only reliable way to keep it.

One check before you render

Look at the preview and ask two questions: does the route fit the frame, and is there actually a story in the period you picked? If both are yes, the film will be good. If the route barely fits, change the format; if there is no story, narrow the range. Asking those two in advance prevents most of the renders people end up not liking.