Trip management

A trip is a named time window over your GPS stream. The same GPS points can belong to multiple overlapping trips; nothing is moved or duplicated under the hood — trips are just queries.

Creating a trip

In the org admin, Trips → New trip. You'll need:

  • Name: shown on the public map and in social previews.
  • Start date / time and end date / time: in your organization's timezone. Tracking auto-starts and auto-stops on these.
  • Visibility (see below).
  • Default transport mode (optional): override the auto-classifier for the whole trip — useful for activities the auto-classifier doesn't know about (horse riding, e-bike, paragliding).
  • Description (optional): markdown supported.

Visibility modes

Mode Who can see it
Public Anyone with the URL; listed on your org's public page
Unlisted Anyone with the URL; not listed publicly
Private Anyone with the URL and a password you set
Members Only signed-in members of your org

Use Unlisted for trips you want to share by link but not publish on your org's home page (typical for personal road trips). Use Private with a password to share with a single recipient.

Each trip exposes a clean URL like app.whereistereza.com/o/yourname/abc123/trip-slug. The first segment is a per-trip share token; the second is the trip slug. The page is indexed in social previews automatically — paste the link in WhatsApp, Slack, or Telegram and it expands to a card with the trip name and a generated map preview.

Auto-start and auto-stop

When the start time arrives, the trip becomes active and tracking turns on for that trip. When the end time passes, the trip stops and the route is post-processed (snapped to roads via the Mapbox Map Matching API for road segments; left as raw GPS for off-road segments). You don't need to remember to flip a switch.

You can manually start or stop a trip from the admin if you need to override.

Transport classification controls

The classifier reads each GPS point's speed plus the OwnTracks / OsmAnd motion-activity hint and auto-detects walking, running, cycling, driving, public transport, horse, boat or flying. It works well for typical trips, but slow city traffic (15–25 km/h) overlaps with cycling speed, and brief stops can flip a few points to walking inside a longer drive.

Three knobs let you keep classification under control without tedious manual labelling — pick the smallest one that does the job:

Default Mode (whole trip)

Trip editor → Transport → Default Mode. Forces every point of the trip into the chosen mode. Use it when:

  • The whole trip was a single activity (Sunday bike ride, scenic drive, hike).
  • The auto-classifier doesn't recognise the activity (horse riding, e-bike, paragliding, kayak).
  • You want simple deterministic stats and don't care about occasional speed-based mode switches.

Excluded modes (whole trip, multi-pick)

Trip editor → Transport → Modes that don't apply to this trip. Tick any modes that were impossible on this specific trip; the classifier reclassifies their points to the closest allowed mode by speed. Use it when:

  • A walk + drive trip is incorrectly tagging slow traffic as cycling — exclude Cycling (and probably Running, Horse, Boat, Transit, Flying).
  • A pure cycling trip mis-detects slow climbs as walking — exclude Walking (the leftover slow points become running).
  • You're driving with stops at viewpoints and don't want each stop to flip to walking — exclude Walking and Running.

This is the right default for "I know which modes I used" trips. It still lets walking + driving auto-detect each other when both are real.

Segments (per time range)

Trip editor → Segments → + Add. Each segment names a time window and forces a specific mode for that window only. Use it when:

  • A specific time range was a different activity (08:00–10:00 drive to trailhead, 10:00–14:30 hike, 14:30–16:00 drive home).
  • You want to label parts of the trip ("Bus to Porto", "Walking the Camino") and have them show as cards in the public summary.
  • Public transport segments need to render dashed (only segments marked public_transport get the dashed line style).

Segments override Default Mode and Excluded Modes for the time range they cover. Points outside any segment fall back to the trip-level rules.

How they layer

auto-detected mode  →  excluded? remap to closest allowed
                    →  inside a segment? use segment's mode
                    →  default-mode override on whole trip? use that

So the most specific rule wins, but the simplest case (just ticking a few excluded modes) handles most real trips.

Metro transit detection

Independent layer that runs after classification: GPS points within 350 m of a known metro station (Prague, London, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, Madrid, Vienna — see Metro transit) are recognised as underground transit and rendered as a dashed public-transport line through the city, not a straight line across the map. No configuration; it just works when the data fits.

See also: Analytics glossary for what each metric means and how mode affects calculations.

Adding photos

In the trip detail, Photos → drag in JPEGs. Each photo is placed on the map at the spot it was taken (using its EXIF GPS tag) or, if no EXIF, at the closest GPS point in time. Captions are markdown.

Sharing trip updates by email

In the trip detail, Subscribers: anyone can subscribe to receive emails when the trip starts, ends, or hits a daily milestone. They get a personal portal URL to manage preferences without needing an account.

Ending a trip permanently

When the end time passes, the trip becomes a static archive. The route stays available at the same URL forever (or until you delete it). You can re-open a trip by editing the end date forward.

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