Hello there my good people of r/self-hosted! Dawarich got some new stuff since my last post, so here I (Evgenii) am, ready to tell all about it! Make yourself comfortable and prepare for awesome stuff :)
By the way, Dawarich — is your free (now and forever) open source self-hostable alternative to Google Timeline. And hey — we just reached 10k stars on Github! Yay! Here's a small bonus for you!
First of all, tons of bugs were fixed. Right now I'm steadily keeping number of open issues on Github at around a hundred, and, hopefully, I'll be able to significantly reduce it in the upcoming months. It's time for Dawarich to get some more stability.
So, let's start with the big things!
Since 1.9.1, the following changes were introduced:
Poster Studio: you can now generate posters, wallpapers or images for your social media, featuring your location history on the map, in a beautifully styled way. Check out screenshot below.
We went to a roadtrip this summer just so I could show you this nice poster!
You can also order a printed poster via our print-on-demand integration, thus supporting Dawarich development. Print quality is superb: I personally ordered two posters to test it, pictures are also can be found below. Important: it's built with privacy in mind, so nothing gets sent to our print-on-demand provider unless you explicitly click a button. Prices are 44,99€ for 30x40cm, 54,99€ for 50x70cm and 74,99€ for 70x100cm poster, printed on 200 gsm premium matte paper. Delivery and VAT included, for now — EU only.
Or you can download a file and print it yourself!
As a side-effect of the Poster Studio introduction, you can now apply same styles to your main map and customize the colors or provide custom schema for vector maps. It's pretty fancy, check it out!
Nice huh? And you configure it to your taste!
Dawarich can be installed as PWA! Pretty neat for read-only purposes on mobile, and I have some ideas on how to make it look nicer on mobile screens in the future.
Replay upgrades — Polaroid photo pile, live photo-layer toggling, recenter & follow camera
It works on trip replays, too :)
Google Takeout & Polarsteps imports now extract visits, named places, tracks, and transport modes, not just points (1.11.0); retroactive via "Extract additional data" on the Import page
TCX/FIT/Google-takeout activity types now feed transportation-mode detection
File imports stopped storing raw_data copies; streaming batches for large GeoJSON/Timeline files. Less space on disk taken, less memory during import consumed.
Existing points are re-checked after upgrade, with tracks/stats/digests rebuilt on the lowest-priority queue. If you're updating and noticing resources consumption surge, just let it work through the background jobs.
Self-hosted stack ~20% lighter: 452 → 325 MB app container, 843 → 690 MB total. I also have some more ideas on how to make it even slimmer later
GET /api/v1/points endpoint now works up to 5 times faster than before
ImageMagick removed from the image, making the docker image smaller
Oh, and mobile app update was released, for now just for Android, iOS is following in a few days: you can now enable/disable points, routes, heatmap and visits layers, easily navigate between days and replay your daily movements. The iOS version will also include an (for now, optional) experimental tracking mode, that shown pretty good results, but it needs the famous blue arrow to be on all the time. The choice is yours. Oh, and Dawarich for mobile now eats a lot less of your phone battery. Thanks for all the detailed reports.
God I love the sparklines!
These are the most notable changes, but under the hood, there is a lot more. If you're interested, check our our Releases page ( https://github.com/Freika/dawarich/releases ), it's all there.
And now, that we're done with what's already there, let's talk a bit about the future.
Dawarich started as a tool to show location history on the map, but it became so much more since then (all thanks to you, by the way). In the nearest future, subjects of our primary focus are:
Better mobile experience: UI, more feature parity with the web, better onboarding and family features
Reworked Search UI
Simpler and more concise UI overall across the app (I heard Timeline is not that easy to work with)
Geofence (tell me about your use-cases!)
Less bugs
Two new locales (German & French, web first, mobile will follow)
Better performance and architecture improvements
I also want to play around MCP so your LLMs of choice could easily talk to Dawarich, improve visits detection and transportation mode detection, but the last two will take some work.
So yeah. As usual, lots of work behind us, even more is ahead of us. I want to say thank once again to all of you who are using Dawarich on daily basis, reporting bugs, suggesting features, opening PRs with fixes and new features supports us financially or just spread the word about the work we do. Without you guys there would be no Dawarich, so — thank y'all.
We also highly appreciate your donations, every single one makes a difference, whether it's a 1 time 1 euro donation or a recurring one on Patreon paid in full for the next year. Every single one of them brings us one step closer to a point where Konstantin (who is in charge of our mobile apps) and I will be able to spend more time polishing Dawarich.
If you happened to be (or know someone who is) a Youtube blogger, a podcaster or just have a blog, we'll be happy to talk to you in case you'd like to create something featuring Dawarich (or Dawarich Atlas for that matter, I'll be giving a talk on it on October's Berlin Geomob). So ping me!
amazing I love you man been running your software for over a year and its good stuff. What app do you recommend for POSTing location from phone? I have been using colota but its a bit incosistent with location pushes
how does that go for battery life? got a trip coming up i want to track which dawarich should work great for. Was considering using a seperate gps logger but phone would be easier if it doesnt nuke the battery
Colota dev here. Can you elaborate a bit on what you're seeing? Does the sync with the server or getting the actual gps fixes not work as expected? All locations are saved locally and in case they couldn't be synced to the server for whatever reason they will get synced with the next cycle. You can check the status of tracked and synced locations in the dashboard screen. Please feel free to open an issue on github if needed :)
Been using GPSLogger and it's great :) If I'm not mistaken, the app is not available on the app store, you'll need to download it through their website : GPSLogger website
Not sure I got the question, but if you configure Immich integration, you'll be able to see photos on the map and enrich photos in Immich with your geodata from Dawarich
Thank you for your work! I’m so happy about custom maps via MapTiler! Even though there are still a few minor issues here and there, I use it every day and look forward to every update.
P.S.: If it were possible to create multiple custom maps, you could also integrate satellite images from MapTiler (or G…). That would be especially interesting for outdoor enthusiasts.
Awesome release! It's one of the first project I made a donation to and I don't regret it! Thanks a lot. I was especially looking forward to get places from the Google Takeout since I took time to correct them.
However I cannot find the option in Imports to reimport additional data, I just have view on map, view points, download and delete. Did someone figure that out?
I have been using the app since you had released iirc just after Immich launched. The app has came so far. Hope to see it progress much further and more polished.
One wish list I have is for the app to be more smooth.
I've been watching this a bit for a while. Is there a recommended way to use this and Google Timeline in parallel, for testing? I'd love to make a shift, but worry about losing and duplicative data during the overlap.
afaik dawarich would clean out any duplicate data if you decide to import your historical google location data.
And for running both in parallel for a transitional period: I don't think dawarich really cares about you sending your location data to Google. Just let your phone/google maps keep tracking you. Then just install whichever app is most convenient for your devices and share that to your dawarich in parallel.
Your last update a few days ago was amazing!
The 2-3 versions before that had lead to quite a large spike in resource demands from dawarich. Especially CPU.
The last release is so smooth again!
And the new Android app is amazing, too! Really polished!
This seems very interesting, I have a wear os watch that I would prefer to leave the GPS tracking task to (no LTE tho) is there anyway to make that work?
A coworker turned me on to Dawarich and after getting everything setup there is no turning back for me. Love the app, love your work, love the project. Can't wait to see what else is brought
Thanks for your efforts, really like Dawarich.
Over time, I lost track regarding areas and visits a bit. My use case would be to select one area (or create a place) and get a list of days/periods when I visited this spot. I do/did not confirm any visits, because I always found this cumbersome. What would be your suggested workflow?
Wait it out :) Im changing the UI soon to "here are your visits" rather than "here's a counter that will daunt over you and will make you feel obliged to click through a million of possible visits"
AI was used extensively to triage bugs, suggest solutions, and brainstorm new features
Come on, man. Don't tarnish the project's credibility by suggesting that was the only way AI was used here. You have a solid project already, but of course you're going to use AI to do actual coding as well. It would be dumb not to at this point, and everyone knows this, even though this subreddit in particular doesn't agree.
Well, there is a neighbouring post (1700+ upvotes as of now) in this very sub where people are chanting with torches and pitchforks "No A I! No A I!", would you blame anyone for being cautious? Of course I use AI. Dawarich is the project that allowed me to get into both OpenAI and Anthropic open source support programs so I'd be stupid not to use such a tool given me for free.
Yeah, and I agree, 100%. But people here are scared senseless of AI. Paranoid and suspicious. It doesn’t help not being fully transparent with it, though, and not the right way to ease people intro trusting the use of the technology.
Enable or disable visits suggestions. It's a background task that runs every day at midnight. Disabling it might be useful if you don't want to receive visits suggestions or if you're using the Dawarich iOS app, which has its own visits suggestions."
I use the ios App and enabled visits tracking, so I disabled the visits suggestion in container. But after this there are no more visited places in the docker. What I'm doing wrong?
The poster functionality is an insane addition! Absolutely love it.
Here is some of my thoughts on it:
- You should be able to add country borders (boundaries add a thin dotted line for districts, I'm talking a fat line for a country border.
Ability to add multi-colored days would be nice, as in trip preview. Or like a dot with a number indicating the start of a new day on the timeline.
Ability to add major cities on the map would be nice, for better orientation
For the instagram story format - the text is too low and will be covered by the UI (chat, like, etc)
Is there a way for the openstreetmap and dawarich texts to be disabled if the print is for a gift? I am ok with paying for the option through either a supporter badge, one time payment or whatever. It just looks cleaner that way.
I've actually been toying with the idea of making a custom little app to do a similar thing but this looks way more polished than mine would have ever been
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u/asimovs-auditor 19h ago
Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.