I'm big on making journal entries while traveling, but for better or worse, Google Maps has been my go-to travel diary for years. Between my phone pretty much constantly pinging my location to Google's servers, I can count on it to help reconstruct a day, retrace steps, or remember the exact order of places I visited on a trip. All too often, I'll remember an interesting statue or monument I visited, but can't remember the name. Google Maps location history comes in clutch to help me identify those moments.

But the world is a different place, and with all your data up for grabs, I don't trust Google to stick to its do-no evil mantra. There are other reasons, too, that have started making that convenience feel like a bit of a trap. For example, Google's recent changes to how Timeline data is stored and managed are a reminder that you don't really own your history. On paper, the move from a cloud-first to phone-first strategy is a win with less centralized data and presumably more privacy. However, it's got its issues. Unless you manually enable backups, hidden deep within the settings, Timeline only keeps a limited window of history by default, and I've first-hand experienced — just a bit too late.

Basically, the default 90-day retention setting feels a bit harmless until you realize that you can lose years of location history because you forgot to flip a default setting. I needed a location history solution that offered more control, permanence, and easy portability. If it could replicate the best parts of Google Timeline, even better. That's how I landed on Reitti.

Reitti is a hub for your location history; it's not just another location tracker

Import your existing history from Google Timeline, GPX, and more

Getting started with Reitti, you quickly realize it doesn't necessarily handle tracking on its own. Instead, it works as a central hub for location history and gives all your tracking data a permanent home, under your control, regardless of where it came from. It's very flexible, allowing you to define the source, storage, and retention workflows, making it pretty versatile across varying use cases.

The app is open source, of course, and can be easily self-hosted using Docker. And that's precisely what I did on my NAS. Once set up, it acts like your personal Google Timeline replacement. The setup process isn't particularly complicated, but it's worth knowing that Reitti makes use of multiple different services to handle your location data. PostGIS is used to store and query location data while RabbitMW manages background tasks and Redis handles the caching.

Using Reitti is pretty straightforward, and it depends on the data that you feed it. You can export your Google Timeline data and upload the JSON files into Reitti. You can also import GPX tracks, which is perfect if you log hikes, runs, drives or bike rides using a dedicated GPS app. GeoJSON imports are supported, too, if you've been logging GPS data for more technical use cases.

For continuous tracking, I've paired Reitti with an app that pushes location updates to it. There are a bunch of options available, but since I have experience using OwnTracks, that's what I opted for. With a link from OwnTracks, Reitti keeps your information up to date as you move through your day. Once Reitti ingests your location history, it starts geocoding raw coordinates into real-world locations using OpenStreetMap data. This clusters location points into recognizable visits, detects stops, and stitches the gaps into journeys that you've previously taken. Think road trips, detours, and the little stops that you take along the way. All of that is easily visible.

A polished interface that's actually built for reviewing location history

Easy exports, OIDC support, and Immich integration

The best part of Reitti is the sheer amount of polish it offers. This matters a lot because the entire purpose of using an app such as this is to go back and review your location history instead of just collecting it. Nor is it restricted to just a single workflow. Reitti offers a wide range of inputs from apps like OwnTracks, GPSLogger and can also work off imported GPX tracks from wearables or devices like a Garmin.

If you so want, you can even integrate it with Immich, the popular self-hosted photo library that serves as an alternative to Google Photos. With Immich support enabled, Reitti can associate your photos with your location history. This lets you recreate the Google Photos experience altogether but entirely on your own hardware.

Similarly, there's robust support for exporting your data, so your information is never locked in. Finally, location history is effectively privileged information, and you wouldn't want any unauthorized user getting access to it. Reitti supports OIDC authentication, which makes it much easier to integrate with identity providers like Authentik.

Reitti is the self-hosted upgrade I've been waiting for

Google Timeline has a lot going for it because of the convenience it offers and its built-in nature. It's convenient, and remains one of the best examples of personal location tracking made useful. But like everything else, owning the hardware and software stack elevates the experience, gives you more control. Reitti does exactly that. By giving you an open-source, self-hosted Google Timeline replacement that doesn't just store coordinates, it gives you a beautiful interface to interact with trips, visits, and journeys. Reitti gives you a polished product that can compete with commercial tools while giving you all the ownership, freedom, and stability that comes with self-hosted tools.