What's New at Trailmarker: A More Personal Way to Map Your Travels

A travel map can show you where you've been. But we all know that the pins behind the map are so much more than just pins. They are memories, photographs, stories, little pieces of your life, and even little pieces of yourself. That's something we've been thinking about a lot while building Trailmarker. Over the past weeks, we've been making some changes to the map and adding new ways to record and share the experiences behind the places you've visited. One of the most common pieces of feedback we received from users was "I want to be able to differentiate the places I've lived within my travel map from the places I've visited" Loud and clear. We've added a "lived here" feature. When you click a country in pin mode, you'll have the option to only leave the pin as a country visit, to pin cities within the country, or to pin the city as "lived here." You can also set a pin to "lived here" within the pin itself, if you click the pin and click the edit button. Another thing we've added is the ability to customize the colors on your travel map. You can now choose your own colors for your visited pins and your lived-here pins. Rather than everyone having exactly the same map, users can now set their map colors to any crazy combination they want. Set the places you have lived (city pin, state/province pin, or country pin) and then if you want to experiment with colors, you can change the colors whenever you like. You can always click the undo button to return to the original Trailmarker gold. It's a small feature, but we think it's a nice one. Your travel map is a record of your own journey, so it should feel like yours. We've also been spending time making the map itself cleaner and easier to use. We've reorganized the map controls so they're easier to find without getting in the way of the map, both on desktop and on mobile. The controls now sit neatly together at the bottom of the screen, giving the map more room to do what it does best. The goal is pretty simple: less clutter, more map. But of course, a map can only tell part of the story. A pin can tell you that you've been somewhere. It can't tell you about the amazing meal you had there, the hike you nearly gave up on, the person you met, or that completely unexpected thing that happened on your second day. That's where Quick Journal comes in. You can add notes, dates and photos to places on your map, giving you somewhere to keep those little details while they're still fresh. It doesn't have to become a serious writing project. Sometimes a few sentences and one photograph are enough to bring an entire trip back to life years later. Quick Journal entries will live within your city pins and are subject to your privacy settings in your account. And sometimes a memory deserves a little more than a few sentences for yourself. That's one of the reasons we introduced Travel Stories. You can take an important experience or journey, add your photographs and tell the story behind the destination. Share it with the Trailmarker platform and then share the link with your friends and family on other social media sites! We're not trying to turn every travel memory into another social-media post. Travel Stories are intended to be something a little more lasting — something you can come back to, edit, share with friends and hopefully still enjoy reading years from now. This is where we're starting to see the bigger picture for Trailmarker. Your map shows where you've been. Your journal remembers the details. Your stories explain why the journey mattered. Over time, we want your Trailmarker profile to become more than a list of countries or a collection of pins. We want it to become a record of your travels — the places you've visited, the places you've lived, the memories you've recorded and the stories you've decided to share. We're still building towards that, and there's plenty more we'd like to do. For now, we're concentrating on making Trailmarker a genuinely useful place to keep track of your travels and the experiences that come with them. Whether you've travelled to two countries or twenty, your journey is worth keeping a record of. Start with your map. Mark the places you've been. Add a note when there's something you want to remember. And when you have a story worth telling, give it a little more room. Your travel history is already there. Trailmarker helps you mark it. Mark your trail.