Help

Add routes and places

Type in the box on the Atlas page, in your own words: a route you took, a single place, the places you lived, or a long voice note. Dates are optional. Press Add or Enter to send. Shift+Enter starts a new line.

To speak, press Dictate, talk, then press Stop. The box takes about ten minutes of speech. Dictate works in Chrome, Edge and Safari, and shows only in browsers that can turn speech into text. The browser sends the audio to its maker’s speech service.

A new atlas starts with a short interview: where you grew up, where you studied, where you lived since, the places you have been, your flights, and any drives, train rides, buses or ferries. Skip any question, or stop at any time. The link under the box picks the interview up again. After “End the interview for good”, the link is gone.

Check the card before you save

Before anything goes on the map, Footprint shows what it understood on a card: each place and each leg, with its dates, mode, depth and companions. Change any field on the card, or reply in the box, such as “it was July”. When a name fits several places, pick the right one. When Footprint finds no place, search for it under “Where is it, roughly?”. A route you took many times goes in once, without a date. To keep the card’s entries as one trip, type a name under “Trip name, optional”. Then save the card, or press Discard.

When an entry on the card matches one in your atlas, the card says “Already in your atlas”. Pick “Update it” to add what is new to the saved entry, or “Add as new” to save a second entry. An update fills empty fields and adds companions and notes. It keeps the dates you saved: a leg’s date can only become a finer date inside it, such as a month inside its year, and a stay’s dates fill only when they are empty.

Edit or delete an entry

Tap a place or a route on the map, or open an entry in the Log. The panel shows every field. Press Edit, change the fields, then press Save changes. To change a place, press “Search for another place”.

A leg that belongs to a route of several legs also shows a Stops list. Press Move up or Move down to reorder a stop, Remove to take one out, or Add a stop to search for a place that goes before the last stop. A route keeps at least two stops. Mode changes the mode of every leg of the route. To change a place at either end, move or remove the stop.

Press Delete to remove the entry. A message at the bottom of the screen offers Undo for 5 seconds.

Change entries in the chat

Write the change in the box on the Atlas page, such as “Move the Lisbon trip to 2018” or “Delete the ferry to Santorini”. Footprint finds the entries and shows each change before and after. Nothing changes until you press Confirm change, or Delete entry for a deletion. A deletion offers Undo for 5 seconds.

This looks wrong

Every entry has “This looks wrong” under Edit and Delete. Say in a sentence what is off, or send nothing, and Footprint checks the entry. It shows a fix before and after. Nothing changes until you confirm. Each check counts as one message toward the daily limit.

Trips

A trip is a named group of places and legs, such as “Japan, spring 2024”. Trips are optional: the map shows every route without them. To make one, type a name under “Trip name, optional” on the card before you save. Trips lists them, and each trip has its own map.

Footprint also groups your entries by date and suggests trips under “Footprint noticed”, in Trips. Accept makes the entries one trip. “Fits a trip” adds loose entries to a trip you saved. Dismiss hides a suggestion until a new entry joins it.

On a trip’s page, Edit trip renames the trip, removes entries, splits it at a leg, merges it into another trip or deletes it. Deleting a trip keeps its entries. In the entry panel, “Add to a trip” and “Remove from trip” move one entry.

Duplicates and missing ways home

With the Exact setting, the Log also shows entries that look like a mistake, under “Footprint noticed”. The General setting has no suggestions. “Likely duplicate” marks two entries that seem to be one. “Merge them” keeps one entry with the details of both, and Undo brings both back. “Keep both” leaves them as they are. “Missing way home” marks a trip that leaves home and does not come back. “Add return flight”, or train or drive, adds the leg back home, and Dismiss hides the suggestion. Nothing changes unless you accept.

The log

With the General setting, the Log has two lists: Places, by country, and Routes, by mode. A place row shows its deepest depth. A route row shows its stops in order, such as “Sagres to Aljezur to Sines”. Open a row to see or change it. A place or a route you saved more than once opens a list of its entries first.

The key has a switch for each mode and each depth. A depth switch hides places of that depth, and never hides a route. A mode switch hides the routes of that mode, and never hides a place. A companion chip keeps the routes with at least one leg you took with that person, and each route keeps all its stops. Pick two companions to see both. If the switches hide everything, press Show everything.

With the Exact setting, the Log lists every entry by year, newest first, with each trip’s entries under its name. Entries without a date come last. Open any row to see or change the entry. A mode switch hides legs, and a depth switch hides stays. Neither hides the other kind of entry.

Stats

Stats shows your countries, your places, your routes, the people you traveled with, and your years. The Detail choice in Settings, General or Exact, sets which figures show.

With General, Stats shows the countries you have been to out of all countries and territories, your places, and your routes. A route is one way you travel between places, such as a flight from Amsterdam to New York. A route you saved in both directions is one route. The route map adds up the length of your routes and counts each route once, however often you took it. Route map by mode splits that total by mode. Stats also shows your longest route and your farthest north and south places.

With Exact, Stats shows your countries and cities, the distance you flew, the distance by mode, the people you traveled with, and your years. The distance counts every leg you saved.

In both settings, countries and places count every place you lived in, visited or stopped at, and a place that only starts a leg. Layovers and places you passed through show on the map, but do not count. Drives and buses count the distance by road. Other legs count the straight distance between the two places.

Distances show in kilometers or miles. A browser set to the US starts with miles. Change the unit in Settings.

Depth

Depth says how much time you spent at a place.

• Lived: you had a home there.
• Visited: you spent time there. A place you add gets this depth, unless you say otherwise or it is a stop on the way: a stop gets Stop, and a home you name in the interview gets Lived.
• Stop: a short stop, such as a day trip or a meal. Mark it "Airport or station only" when you never left it. That kind does not count as a country or a place.
• Passed through: you went through without getting out.

In the General setting, the map tints the regions that hold your lived, visited and stopped places, darker where you have more of them, once you zoom in past the countries.

Modes

Each leg has a mode, with its own color and line pattern on the map, in the key and in the Log.

• Flight: a dashed arc that rises off the globe.
• Train, Drive and Bus: a line along the roads in the Exact setting. Trains follow the roads too, so the line can differ from the rail line in a tunnel or on a high-speed line.
• Ferry: a scheduled ferry or hydrofoil between two ports.
• Boat: a cruise, a sailing trip or a chartered boat.

The General setting draws these road lines loose, with fewer points and rounded corners. Ferries, boats and legs with no road line draw the shortest line between the two places in both settings.

The daily limit

You can send 100 messages a day. Each message counts once, however many steps Footprint takes for it: a trip to add, a change, a question about Footprint, an interview answer, or a “This looks wrong” check. The count starts again at midnight UTC.

At the limit, the chat pauses and keeps your message. Everything else still works: the map, Edit and Delete in the entry panel, the Log, trips, suggestions and stats.

Your data

Footprint keeps your atlas in a database in Frankfurt, Germany. No other user can see it. This is what leaves Frankfurt:

• The text you send, and the matching entries when you ask for a change, go to the AI model through Vercel AI Gateway. The model never gets your whole atlas.
• Your sign-in emails go out through Resend.
• For a drive, a bus or a train, the coordinates of its two ends go to the OpenStreetMap road router, which returns the line on the roads.
• A place name that Footprint does not know goes to the OpenStreetMap place search.

Export, import and settings

Open Settings from the account menu, the round button with a person at the top right.

• “Export your atlas” gives you one file, atlas.json, with every place, leg and trip. Keep it as a backup.
• “Import an atlas” takes an atlas.json file. Footprint adds its entries to your atlas and asks you to find any place it does not know. It leaves out the entries your atlas has already.
• “Distance” switches between kilometers and miles.
• “Detail” sets what Footprint shows. General shows where you have been and the routes you have done. Exact adds dates, trips and the distance you traveled.
• “Delete account” deletes your account and your whole atlas. You cannot undo it, so export your atlas first to keep a copy.