Hi there my dear people of r/selfhosted! Fresh bunch of Dawarich news is due, make yourself comfortable :)
To whom it may concern, Dawarich — is your (is and always will be) a free open source self-hostable alternative to Google Timeline.

AI Disclosure (as per https://lemmy.world/post/49320548):

Implementation - Generated

Testing - Generated

Design - Generated

Our links:

Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Website: https://dawarich.app/

iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dawarich/id6739544999

Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.dawarich.Dawarich

Nine releases, what a month! And not a puny ones, this time we managed to speedrocket Dawarich performance in browser.
If you have hundreds of thousands (or even millions!) of points and you'd love to see them all on the map, previously that would be not an easy task for Dawarich. It would crash your browser, as many times as you try loading the data. But no more! Our very own community member, the man behind the Docker image we're using to run Photon, Robin (https://github.com/rtuszik) suggested a fresh approach to loading points: just render them as map tiles! Together we brought this idea to life and now my own dataset consisting of 957,350 geo points gets loaded in less than 1 second! That's kinda insane to me, to be honest. And yeah, instead of ~590MB of JSON transferred to your browser, it took uhhh 150KB? Just don't forget to enable the toggle in the map settings.

If you want to drag your points, do disable it though, seamless points editing will be added bit later. Oh, and tracks are being now served in the same manner, too. And routes, and fog of war layers. It's all a lot faster now!
Dawarich now speaks 6 languages! German, Spanish, French, Polish and Catalan were added to the default English. Simplified Chinese is on the way, and feel free to suggest your own locales :) You can change it in Settings -> General

Visit detection was rebuilt from scratch and it's finally useful. God knows I procrastinated this feature long enough, but now it's in a very good shape. Suggests real places I visited, and community members are also confirming it's not just me — for them it also yielded very relevant results. By the way, you'll no longer see the annoying "99+" counter of the visits on your timeline button. We all hated the feeling of an unfinished job but let's be real ain't nobody got time to click all the suggested visits. Now they are just there, without the irritating counter, sitting patiently, waiting for you to delete them or... just let them be. They are precise enough now, after all, so why not, right?

Deleting a visit also leaves an invisible tombstone now, so the visit won't be resuggested again. And the Timeline panel got much cleaner. I'm still not entirely satisfied with its state, so some changes are due, I want smoother UX.

By the way, one of former Dawarich user mentioned something like we're making the Timeline "less and less useful with each release", so here I'd like to use the opportunity and ask you guys, do you share same feeling? What's good about Timeline, what's not so good? I'd love it to be as useful and convenient as possible, so your feedback is very important. Thank you!

Transportation modes, also rebuilt. This one is a lot trickier and even Google itself fails to properly attribute the way a human being moved (suggesting driving over train ride for example), but it's still got significantly more reliable. I have some cool work ahead of me to make it even better, but that's a secret.

Videos are finally here! God I love videos. The Video Studio first was released as a free tool on our website (https://dawarich.app/tools/route-video-maker/), and then I added it to Dawarich itself, which makes it easier to use your own routes to create a video.

Check it out!

And here's an actual video produced by Dawarich Video Studio: https://youtube.com/shorts/mEUe4RktKSg

Also, the "Share" button on the map page now also has a way for you to create and share a poster or a video. Your memories were never more material!

Rendering is being done in your browser, and it allowed me to not cram another backend service into the Dawarich stack, neat.

Map v1 (Leaflet) is gone. I'm surprised nobody really complained about it. I'll take it as a sign that Maplibre version is a lot better!

Geocoding settings are now available in Settings->Integrations, with selection of providers supported by Dawarich and appropriate settings available for them. The ENV vars are still there and take precedence over what's configured in the UI, so no breaking changes.

Imports got smarter:

• Google Takeout & Polarsteps now extract visits, named places, tracks and the source app's tication — not just raw GPS points. Google's own place names (Home, Work…) are kept. Older imports: "Extract additional data" in the Imports list. "Remove extracted data" undoes it without touching your points.
• FIT files with developer data fields (Wahoo devices) now import instead of failing to parse
• Traccar KML exports now import LineString points instead of finishing with zero.
• Google Timeline: fixed altitude/accuracy/speed being silently dropped from rawSignals, and estamps no longer scramble path order.
• Imports finishing with zero saved points now tell you instead of completing silently.
• Tracks no longer stitch two different devices together (Records.json contains every device

Tracks calculation got a lot smarter: fewer skims along the route, better anomaly points detection, better distinction between different devices tracking simultaneously, hence stats distance calculation now has better precision.

Preparation work is being done for the Family feature coming to our mobile apps. We're currently testing it internally and are hoping to release it there soon. Also, OwnTracks' HTTP mode now can show your family members in the app: every upload is answered witveryone sharing with you.

Database optimisation works are also in progress: most of the August releases are containing some changes to how Dawarich writes and serves your data, it may lead to bigger space consumption. In the end, when the process is done (hopefully before end of September), I'll provide an instruction on how to shrink your databases with no data loss. If you'd like to do it now — do the full vacuum to the points table. For the rest of you — please wait for the next post or keep an eye on our changelogs, it will be there.

⚠️ If you're upgrading from 1.10.x, do these once

• Restart the app after migrations have run — until then, deleting a visit looks like it worked without saving.
• Settings -> Visits -> re-detect (self-hosted does this fleet-wide automatically; SKIP_VISITS_FLEET_REDETECT=1 to opt out).
• Map settings -> Transportation Mode Detection → "Re-classify my history."
• Map v2 -> Settings -> "Recalculate tracks & stats" to apply the gap-distance fix to past months.
• Expect background backfills to run for a while on big histories. Progress is under Background jobs settings.

Mobile app UI was updated! It now includes better navigation between days, you can select date range to show your data, and you can also replay your day on the map. We added new layers: points and heatmap, more to follow.

If you're hosting Dawarich behind cloudflared or similar gateway, you can now benefit from custom HTTP headers to connect your mobile app to your Dawarich instance.

We added Smart Tracking mode for Android and Continuous Tracking mode for iOS. Enable precise tracking mode to see the toggle. Both modes use motion-aware updates to toggle tracking on and off to save your battery life.

Well, I guess, that's it for today?

And as always, our links one more time to save you a scroll:

Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Website: https://dawarich.app/

iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dawarich/id6739544999

Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.dawarich.Dawarich

Donate: https://www.patreon.com/freika / https://github.com/sponsors/Freika/

P.S. 1st of October I'll be speaking at Berlin's Geomob event ( https://thegeomob.com/ ) come and say hi!

See y'all soon!

I'm currently using reitti, which simply does not deal with the position reported by my phone being noisy. I get all the noise shown on the map. Does Dawarich do any denoising?

Yup, we have some gps noise filtering enabled by default, and I'm working on improving it over time

This is one of my favorite projects to self-host. At first I just wanted to get my data out of Google, but it's great to see how fast the project is growing

Thank you!

Going to try this :) thnx

Not to poop out your party, but what exactly is this used for? I have so long been confused by Google Timeline because it never seemed like anything but an excuse to harvest data about every single movement of your life.

EDIT: Thanks for the answers guys, can't say I need these features, but I'm glad that you've found a way to satisfy them without giving Google access to your data!

Oh it was. Google timeline should have never become a thing for anyone worried about privacy.

The thought behind it is actually pretty neat though. Being able to see a list of places you've previously visited is just super neat to have. Hosting it at home just means that nobody else has that information.

Yay!

I personally use it to always have an answer to a question "where I've been on x date" or "when I've been at y place", plus business trips reimbursements, plus tax declaration purposes (how many days I went to work from the office), and also I just like stats and nice pictures I can share in social media :)

So it's both practical and fun!

It's wild to me that Google has this checkbox enabled by default for hundreds of millions of its users for at least a decade. Selfhosters can take control back now, feels good

You can try Colota as a way of recording your phone location with its own filtering before it uploads to Reitti/Dawarich

I used Google Timeline to prove I was at work one time. This was back when I was freelancing. My client tried to say I was stealing time, because I had an off-site meeting that ran long. They were threatening to withhold a few hours of pay, even though I was at the worksite the entire time. I pulled up my timeline and used it to prove that I was, in fact, at the meeting site for an extra few hours. Being able to de-Google that functionality has a lot of value to certain people.

I'm using colota, but it's still very noisy.

Out of the box Colota records every fix it gets by the device. So in case you haven't already I would suggest to enable the accuracy filter and set it e.g. to 25m. This way all points with accuracy worse than 25m get filtered out. Also the movement threshold helps with the stationary drift

Until those same people refuse to believe anything except Google because "big company = more trustworthy" or some bullshit.

I kind of get it though. If I were the client in this situation I would trust closed source Google way more than some self-hosted app I've never heard of, which could be subject to user-manipulation.

That being said, for personal or nonprofessional use, this thing seems fantastic, especially from a privacy perspective.

Cool project. Does it work local-only, too, with backend optional? Would it catch-up backend sync once it gets configured? I would like to just try it for a bit before attempting to host the backend.

Hi, I have both Dawarich and Reitti installed, I tend to use Reitti a lot more because it shows my family on the map as soon as I log in, and I can review their timelines as well.

Any chance this could make it into Dawarich?

Very cool. I still haven't managed to render a video, no matter how many browsers I try. It's says I should use a modern browser.... I run Linux Mint and Firefox. Also tried Firefox via snap (crashed even before opening any url) and Chrome.

I get it as well, which is what my own frustration stems from 😂

Yeah, this - one of the big reasons I still have a google account is for convenient location sharing with family and friends.

I would love to use this, but either it, my Pixel 10 Pro, GraphineOS or the apps are just so wildly inaccurate that it just isn't worth using.

I never left the house let alone walked or cycled anywhere.

I use colota for location tracking on my GrapjeneOS pixel. It has geofences where you can disable GPS logging in certain places / when connected to certain networks. I get clena results when I'm in known places for a long time that way.

Thabks. Giving this a try today. The geofence seems to solve my biggest complaint with my at home status being all up and down my block while I'm just sitting on my couch.

Does this have a heat overlay? As in, can I see which routes I take most commonly my filtering and overlaying a years worth of data? That's the only thing that's kept me on Strava. I know there are a few open source tools, but nothing has looked this complete for me. This looks super cool.

Yup, heatmap layer is there since the very beginning :)

I have some plans to significantly improve transportation mode detection :)

I haven't got a chance to test it on Linux yet, but Macos and Windows are working

The mobile apps are relying heavily on the backend, because self-hosted was the way from day 1. In the future it's possible we'll introduce some offline-first features, but currently cant promise anything.

Although you can just download mobile app and track your movements for a bit, they will be shown on the map

Family layer is togglable, and if your family members enabled sharing not just position but also location history, you'll see their tracks. Not timelines though, I never thought about such a use case 🧐

I see that now. I must have missed it in my excitement. Thanks!

I am not a expert, but I am assuming it has less to do with the mode of transportation being detected, and more to do with whatever on my phone causes this mess of random points while stationary.

Imagine if you can't find your loved one for some reason, car crash, or out of gas and they can't communicate (no reception, dead battery). Having quick access to their timeline facilitates a fast response.

These kind of apps have a ton of value for emergencies and the overall security of a family.

Well sucks to be me, then 😅

I get this too. Its GPS position accuracy. In highly urbanised or indoor, it hapoens ..

Yes, i have similar needs. I started recording my tracks in 2015 when i discovered osmand. I literally stored these tracks on my nas for years thinking that at some point, i would chuck in GIS or something to view my history. Then i discovered Dawarich which does it all for me.

Where is this setting? I cant find it in Colota.

Sorry, should have mentioned it when i refer to it. In "Settings > Tracking & Sync > Advanced Settings"
See also https://colota.app/docs/configuration/gps-settings

You must mean "Quality filters"? Well, nithing happens when i tap that.

There is a toggle next to it which enables it. A rework for the UI is already on the roadmap :D

Thanks. This dark mode theme i have doesn't show things very well. Need to change it.