Trip Replay

Replay a finished trip as a cinematic playback. A pulsing marker animates along the recorded GPS route, the trail draws itself behind it, and any photos taken on that trip fade in over the marker as the journey passes their locations. Designed for both reliving a trip and presenting it to others.

How to start it

Open any finished trip from the trip selector at the top of the public map. In the trip summary card on the left, next to the Copy and Share buttons, there's a ▶ Replay button. Click it.

The map dims the existing day-segment lines into a pale "ghost trail", a glassmorphic control bar slides up from the bottom, and a golden pulsing marker starts moving from the trip's first GPS point. The right-side widgets (Layers, Date Filter, About Me, Weather) hide automatically so the focus is entirely on the map and the live stats.

Live (in-progress) trips don't show the Replay button — there's nothing finished to replay yet. Open the trip after it ends.

Controls

The bottom control bar gives you full playback control:

The camera follows the marker automatically, with a Google-Maps-style cinematic pan when the marker drifts toward the viewport edge. No need to fiddle with the map — sit back and watch.

Live stats

During replay the hero card on the left comes alive — the numbers update in real time as the marker moves along the path:

• Distance (km) ramps from 0 toward the trip total.
• Average speed converges toward the final average.
• Max speed shows the fastest segment seen so far.
• Moving time ticks up, counting only segments where the GPS showed actual movement (≥ 1.5 km/h).

When replay ends or is closed, the hero card smoothly restores the trip's static totals.

3D Drone Flythrough

The headline feature. Click the 3D toggle in the replay bar and the flat map transforms into a satellite-imagery terrain flythrough powered by Mapbox GL JS. The camera follows the marker across real 3D terrain — mountains rise, valleys open up, rivers carve the landscape below.

Two camera modes

Switch between them with the Camera button in the replay bar:

• Drone chase — 72° pitch, close-up view (zoom 15). The camera follows just behind the marker like a pursuit drone, rotating smoothly to track the path direction. Best for mountain passes, winding coastal roads, and any trip where the terrain tells a story.
• Bird's eye — 55° pitch, wider field of view (zoom 13.5). A higher vantage point for trips through plains, cities, or long straight stretches where you want landscape context rather than ground detail.

What makes it smooth

Getting a 3D flythrough to look cinematic — not jittery — required multiple layers of signal processing:

• Pre-smoothed GPS path. Before replay starts, a Gaussian filter (σ = 4.0, 15-point window) runs over the recorded points. This eliminates single-sample GPS noise without lagging behind the actual path.
• Multi-sample bearing. The camera's heading is averaged across three look-ahead points at different distances, then vector- averaged to handle the 360°/0° wraparound correctly. Result: the camera doesn't snap to every micro-turn.
• Speed-aware dampening. At high replay speeds (250×+), the bearing tracking loosens automatically — the camera holds its general heading and lets the trail flow under it instead of whiplashing on every curve.
• Path tile preloading. When 3D mode opens, the system walks the camera along the path off-screen to force all satellite tiles into cache. This eliminates the "green hills turn grey when I get there" artifact that raw tile loading would produce.

What it shows

• Satellite imagery draped over real elevation data (Mapbox terrain DEM) with 1.8× vertical exaggeration so hills and valleys visibly pop.
• Atmospheric fog that adds depth — distant terrain fades into a soft haze, which both looks cinematic and hides tile-mosaic seams in the distance.
• Dynamic sky that follows the trip's time of day — sun position is computed from the GPS timestamp at each moment.
• Route trail — a ghost line shows the full planned route; a bright accent trail grows behind the marker showing what's been traveled.
• Pulsing radar marker — identical to the 2D version. A solid accent dot with an expanding ring that fades out, screen-aligned so it's always visible regardless of camera angle.

Device support

3D mode works on any device with WebGL support. On lower-end devices (< 3 GB memory), the system shows a one-time battery warning and automatically lowers satellite tile resolution and DEM detail for stable frame rates. If WebGL isn't available, the 3D toggle simply doesn't appear — no error, no broken state.

Photos appear as you go

If your trip has photos with GPS coordinates, they'll fade in next to the marker the moment the replay reaches their location. Each photo stays visible for about 3.5 seconds, then gently fades out over a longer transition for that polished, cinematic feel.

The photo overlay uses the same gold-bordered frame as the regular marker hover preview — consistent design, no second visual style.

If photos are clustered close together, the next one replaces the current one immediately. Scrubbing backwards on the timeline rewinds the photo queue too — you'll see the right photos for whatever moment you jumped to.

Works in fullscreen

Press the fullscreen button (bottom-right corner on both the 2D and 3D map) and the replay continues uninterrupted. The control bar, timeline, speed selector, camera mode switch, and photo overlays all stay visible inside the fullscreen view. The right-side widgets stay hidden during replay so nothing competes with the map.

This is the recommended way to present a trip to an audience or record screen-grabs for social media — especially in 3D Drone mode at 250× speed in fullscreen. That's the share-worthy wow moment.

Where Replay shines

• Presentations. Open the trip, hit Replay at 250×, enable 3D Drone, switch to fullscreen. Twenty-day pilgrimages compress to a few minutes of watchable drone-style footage with photos appearing at the right moments. The live km counter ticking up adds tension.
• Memories. Re-watch your own trip at the speed of memory — 100× in Bird's eye feels like an evening's stroll through the route from above, with the Polaroids of each spot floating up just as you "arrive" there.
• Sharing. Send the trip URL to friends and family; anyone who opens it can hit Replay and watch the same animation. Privacy settings on the trip apply (private trips still need the password).

Photos can be added retroactively

You don't have to upload photos during the trip. Open the trip in your admin any time after it ends and add photos in bulk. Each photo's position on the map is decided automatically based on what metadata it carries:

1. GPS coordinates in EXIF → the photo lands at its exact recorded latitude / longitude, regardless of when you upload it.
2. No GPS, but EXIF capture time → the photo snaps to the GPS point in your trip whose timestamp is closest to the photo's capture time. So a photo with a known time still lands at roughly the right place along the route.
3. No GPS and no time (e.g. screenshots, scanned prints, re-exports that stripped metadata) → the photo lands at the trip's latest known position. Drag and drop the thumbnail in the trip's photo editor to place it manually anywhere on the map you like.

After photos are placed, just open the trip and hit Replay — they'll show up in the slideshow automatically, ordered by their position along the route. No re-upload, no special "replay mode" upload. The same photos that pin to the map also drive the replay.

Segment Replay

Don't want to watch the whole trip? Each trip segment (a named section like Santiago de Compostela Pilgrimage) has its own Replay this segment button inside its expanded card in the left widget.

Click it and the replay runs only through that segment's GPS points — same controls, same 3D Drone mode, same photo slideshow, just scoped to the time range of that one segment. Useful when a trip spans multiple days and modes and you want to relive just the morning walk, not the 1,700 km flight that preceded it.

The main Replay button next to the trip title still replays the entire trip end-to-end.

Smart photo overlay

During replay, photos pop up near the marker as the route reaches the spot where they were taken. The overlay positions itself above the marker by default, but if that would overlap the trip widget, layers panel, or daily-log strip, it tries below, then right, then left — picking the first placement that fits the visible viewport. No manual positioning needed; the photo stays readable without obscuring the stats you're watching.

Smooth replay trail

The marker and the growing trail both follow the same Catmull-Rom curve used by the gold route line. In earlier builds, the marker took a straight-line shortcut between raw GPS points — cutting across bays, piers, or sharp bends — while the trail curved along the road. They now track identically, so the marker never leaves the path.

Related

• Photos in place — full details on photo uploads, captions, lightbox, sharing, and privacy.
• Trip management — visibility and per-trip controls.
• Themes — Replay respects the active theme; the marker pulse and trail use the theme accent color.

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