How to make a map of all the places you've been

Most people sit on a decade of trips, day-outs and weekends away that exist only as folders on a phone. The instinct is right: you remember places before you remember dates. The question is which map, and how much of your life it ends up owning.

Three honest ways to do it

1. Google Maps Timeline (free, but it's surveillance)

If Location History is on, Google has already built you a quiet map of everywhere you've been. Open Google Maps, tap your profile, then Your Timeline. It's accurate, automatic, and it's also a decade-long location log living in an ad company's database. Fine for a curious afternoon. Not what most people want as the place their family memories live.

2. A custom Google My Maps

Free and flexible. You can drop pins, label them, drag in photos, and share a link. The trade-off is the work: every pin is manual, the layers get messy quickly, and the finished thing looks like a spreadsheet with a map on top. Good for a one-off project (a wedding road trip, a retirement-gift map). Painful as a living family memory.

3. A purpose-built memory map

This is the option most people actually want and don't know exists. An app where each place gets a pin, a few photos, a date and a story, organised around the moments rather than the route. Keepglobe is built for exactly this: a private 3D globe you can share with the people who were there, without turning your memories into a public profile.

What to put on it (and what to leave off)

The mistake is treating it like a passport stamp competition. The places that age best on a memory map are usually the small ones: the café you always ended up in, the lake you swam in as a kid, the street you lived on for one year. Countries are easy. The texture is in the postcodes.

A few habits help. One pin per moment, not per country. Write the story while you're adding the photos, because future-you won't remember it otherwise. And invite the people who were there — they'll fill in the half you'd already forgotten.

The two-hour starter method

You don't need to map your whole life. Pick the last twelve months, open your camera roll, and drop a pin for each trip or weekend that comes up. That's usually 10–25 pins and it's enough to feel like a map. Then go back one week at a time: a school holiday, the year abroad, the post-university road trip. Soon enough the globe starts to look like your actual life.

If you want the private version

Keepglobe is free to start, and it's built around the family use case from the ground up — private by default, shareable only with the people you invite, no public feed, no ads. See our story for why we made it that way, or /pricing for the £2.99/month details.