Wayline Support

Plan, track and share the trips you actually take.

Getting started

Wayline builds a map of a trip from two things you already have: where you went, and the photos you took. Every trip is built and stored on your device — there is no account and nothing to sign up for.

From the Wayline home screen you can:

• Plan or map a trip — create a new trip with a title and dates.
• Try a sample trip — explore a fully built demo map without importing anything. This is the fastest way to see what the app does.
• Open a trip someone shared — open a .trip file someone sent you.

Getting your route: record it or import it

A trip needs a path. There are two ways to get one, chosen on the New trip screen.

Record it

Best for a trip that has not happened yet. Wayline follows along for the trip's dates — nothing to export and nothing to remember. When you are ready to see the map, open the trip and choose Build map from recording from the map's menu.

Import a location history file

Best for a trip you have already taken. Pick a file on the New trip screen and Wayline reconstructs the route from it. See Exporting Timeline data below.

If your trip has already finished, recording is not offered — there is nothing left to record, so importing is the only option.

Exporting your Google Maps Timeline data

You can hand Wayline the .zip exactly as you downloaded it. There is no need to unzip it or find the right file inside — Wayline reads every file it recognises.

From your phone

Google Maps → your profile picture → Your Timeline → the ⋮ menu → Location & privacy settings → Export Timeline data.

From Google Takeout

Go to takeout.google.com, select only Location History (Timeline), and choose JSON as the format.

Formats Wayline can read

Large exports are fine. A Records.json of 100 MB or more is read a piece at a time rather than loaded whole, and only the dates of your trip are kept, so importing a decade of history for a one-week trip stays quick.

Photos on the map

When you allow photo access, Wayline looks at photos taken between your trip's start and end dates and places them on the route. Each group of nearby photos becomes a hotspot pin — tap one to see the photos taken there.

Why is a photo in the wrong place, or missing?

Photos are placed two ways, in order of preference:

1. The photo's own GPS tag. Most phone photos have one.
2. By time along your route. A photo with no location is placed where you were at the moment it was taken. This rescues shots from a camera without GPS, or taken with location services off. These are labelled in the photo viewer so you know the position was inferred.

A photo taken during a gap in your recording is left off the map rather than guessed at. If a lot of photos are missing, your route probably has gaps — try Follow roads, or import a more complete export.

My photos are all shifted by a few hours

That is a camera clock set to the wrong time zone, and Wayline corrects it automatically: it compares GPS-tagged photos against your route and applies the median time difference before placing untagged photos. If it still looks wrong, check the date and time settings on the camera that took them.

I added or changed photos after building the trip

Open the trip and choose Rescan photo library from the map's menu.

Tidying up a trip

The import is a first draft. From the photo viewer and the map's menu you can adjust it:

• Make cover — sets the photo shown on a hotspot's pin. Without one, the pin shows the first photo taken there, which is often why an odd-looking shot ends up on it.
• Favorite — builds a shortlist for sharing. This is separate from Make cover.
• Hide from trip — removes a photo from the story. It does not delete the photo. The file is untouched in your device library, and you can bring it back from Hidden photos in the map menu, or from the undo button on the message that appears.
• Hotspot size — changes how close together photos must be to count as one place. Use it if pins are too clustered or too scattered.

Hiding a photo can split a hotspot that it was holding together, so the groups are rebuilt after each change. Hidden photos are left out of shared .trip bundles.

Recording and battery

Recording is designed to be cheap. Wayline asks for a position based on how far you have moved rather than on a timer, so a phone sitting still costs almost nothing. On iOS the system is allowed to power the GPS down when it decides you have stopped; on Android, Wayline drops to a coarse, infrequent mode after a sustained period of stillness and comes back as soon as you move.

Things worth knowing

• Recording is scoped to the trip's dates. Setting up a trip three weeks early does not start the GPS for three weeks — it begins when the trip does, and stops itself when the trip ends.
• Force-quitting the app stops recording until you open Wayline again. This is an operating system rule that applies to every app. If you swipe Wayline away, expect a gap.
• Android shows a permanent notification while recording. That is required by the platform, and it is the honest signal that recording is happening.
• You can stop at any time from the trip's map. What has been recorded so far is kept.

Nothing was recorded

If Build map from recording says nothing has been recorded yet, check that the trip's dates include today, that recording is switched on for that trip, and that Wayline has Always location permission in your device settings. Then move around a little — a phone that has not travelled at least 25 m has nothing to store.

Following the roads

Location exports often record only the start and end of a drive, so the line between them cuts straight across country. Follow roads looks up the actual road between those points and redraws the line along it.

It is offered as a switch when you import a trip, and afterwards from the map's menu. It only redraws gaps of 800 m or more, and only for driving and cycling — walking and transit legs are left alone, because a walking path through a driving map produces nonsense. Each leg is looked up once and the result is saved with the trip.

This is the one feature that sends anything off your device — the coordinates of those legs go to an OpenStreetMap routing service. Your photos are never involved. If the lookup fails or you are offline, your original route is kept unchanged. See the Privacy Policy for details.

If you see "Could not reach the routing service", check your connection and try again later — the service is shared and occasionally rate-limits requests. Your route is never lost when this happens.

Sharing a trip

Everything is produced on your device and handed to the normal share sheet, so you can send it anywhere.

Sharing more photos than Instagram accepts. Instagram takes ten photos per Story upload and silently drops the rest, so a longer shortlist is split into numbered batches, oldest first. Share one, come back, and share the next.

Before you send a .trip file: it contains the whole trip — where you were, when, and your photos. Send it only to people you would show the photos to directly.

Privacy and your data

Wayline has no account, no server and no database. Your trips, routes and photos are built and stored on your device, and the developer has no ability to see them.

• To delete a trip: delete it from the trip list. That removes its route, its recorded positions, its hotspots and its copies of photos.
• To delete everything: uninstall Wayline.
• To revoke access: change Wayline's location or photo permissions in your device settings at any time.

Full detail, including exactly what the map and routing services receive, is in the Wayline Privacy Policy.

Troubleshooting

The trip built, but there are no photos

Photo access was probably declined. Grant Wayline photo access in your device settings, then use Rescan photo library from the map's menu. On iOS, if you granted access to only selected photos, Wayline can only see those — choose more, or switch to full library access.

The trip built, but there is no route

The file probably contains no positions inside your trip's dates. Check that the trip's start and end dates match when you actually travelled, and that the export covers that period. Time zones matter here: a trip that began late at night may need the previous day included.

My route is a scribble, or shoots across the map

Wayline already filters bad fixes and impossible jumps. If something still looks wrong, it is usually a genuine gap in the source data. Try Follow roads to redraw the unrecorded stretches.

My flight is drawn as a thin dashed line and is not in my distance total

That is intentional. The line between two airports is not a road anyone travelled, and one long flight is further than every road on a trip put together — counting it would make the distance figure meaningless.

The distance changed after I used Follow roads

Also expected, and more accurate. Wayline measures the geometry it actually draws, so replacing a straight line across a bay with the road around it increases the distance to the real figure.

The app is slow or runs out of memory on a big import

Very large archives take time on older devices. Keep Wayline in the foreground while it imports, make sure the device has free storage, and if possible import a single Timeline file rather than a full multi-year Takeout archive.

Reporting a problem

Email support@bernikins.com. To get to an answer quickly, include as much of this as you can:

• Your device and OS version (for example "iPhone 14, iOS 18.2").
• The Wayline version, from the App Store listing.
• What you were doing when it happened — recording, importing, sharing.
• If it was an import: which kind of file, and roughly how big.
• The exact wording of any error message, and a screenshot if you have one.

Please do not send us your Timeline export or your photos. We do not need them, and we would rather not receive them — a description of the problem is enough.

Feature requests are welcome at the same address.