My last camera for the sake of pure photography, I believe I bought it around early 2010s. It was a click-and-shoot with GPS tagging. Smartphone cameras were still playing catch up, and while the GPS chip gave it more metadata, hardly any software could make use of it. The geolocation data lived by itself, not matched to a place. And it was not easy to export elsewhere, either. Scroll forward to 2026, I wish I hadn’t bought the camera at all. Smartphones genuinely provide impressive quality for a portable device, with much needed metadata (including accurate date and time), face recognition baked into the apps, and GPS. My plan to mark where I have traveled with photos crumbled.

Dawarich is a free, open-source self-hosted location history tracker. It comes as a bundle of a docker image and mobile apps. As you can imagine, it does support importing location history from photo libraries (Immich or PhotoPrism) over API. I’d say the tracker is best used for frequent road travelers — photos for iconic or memorable moments and the tracker to keep record of mundane, easy to miss, moments.

One caveat — though I suppose this is now a well-known fact. Geolocation tracking, the kind currently available through smartphones, is not accurate at all. Enough for me to say it won’t work without a fallback mechanism in an urban area. Most of the photos I took in the early days of smartphones are tagged with GPS and nothing else. Not matched to a building or a business, so the information is less than useful inside a high-rise, a mall, or anywhere denser than a single family home. If you want more stats in your life, one medium may not be the safest way to go.