Introducing reitti: a selfhosted alternative to Google Timeline

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I don't actually have any personally. I'm still with Google Photos for now and hadn't decided what to switch to, with Immich, Nextcloud, and the non-open Synology Photos being the top of my list. Legitimately, what a tool like this supports could be a factor I use to help decide.

How complicated is the code interfacing with Immich? Is it a piece someone not familiar with your overall code base could relatively easily pick up and make a pull request for?

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This looks really cool! I just have one question. Is it possible to just install this like normal software on a Linux machine or does it require Docker?

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I do not think it is that complicated. The front-end sends a request to the back-end with the current selected day. This triggers a search in Immich returning all photos taken on that specific day. This is returned to the front-end and this than does the heavy lifting like filtering them to the current map bounds, displaying them on the map at a specific location. We proxy all request from the front-end through our server because of CORS issues and I did tried to avoid having to configure Immich besides creating a token for the API.

One would need to either create a specific IntegrationService like ImmichIntegrationService and then figure out a way how the user can configure that. The easiest would be that we just then call all available ones even if I do not see the use case of having multiple Photo-Servers. But it would make the code in Reitti cleaner and would not hurt if we do not configure 20 simultaneous servers

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Thank you.

At the moment i do not have any plans of providing a way of running it without docker. Mainly because of time to support that.

Since it is a Spring-Boot-Application it would be possible to create a jar file which you can execute or deploy as a service with systemd. But then you have to make sure all prerequisites are also running. That is the one thing I like about docker and especially docker compose.

But short answer: Yes, it is possible but you are on your own at the moment. I would help and maybe we can add a section to the readme how to do it.

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Great project!
Any recommendations for an iOS app for this? I've been using OwnTracks, but it works very unreliably. As far as I understand, it's an OS problem since Apple allows for very limited background processing for the sake of saving battery, so there's not much any logging apps can do, but I was just curious if someone found a way around it.

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What's the difference from Dawarich, if I may ask? Beside from a better name

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Thanks As a German I really like the name Dawarich. First it sound really nice for me but also that "Da war ich" means "There have i been" in german makes, at least for me, an awesome project name.

Take this with a grain of salt because I have no idea what the plans are for Dawarich or have ever been and this is solely based on my external view. For me the main differences are:

visits and trips are our main data, everything else is just the way to calculate them. For Dawarich it looks to me, that it is the other way around. It displays all the location data in good way with the heatmap and so on but visits or places seems so tacked on. This should not be an offense against it. I actually still have an instance running and it was the main pushing point to finally start working on Reitti.
the sleek UI but this depends on your taste

In the end, they are not that far off. Maybe a matter of taste.

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Not really, I stopped using IOS a year ago because of exactly this reason. Had a lot of problems syncing files because of the power saving. I understand why IOS is doing it and for a normal user I think it is the way to go. But anything beyond that, it only hinders the experience you get out of apps. Maybe someone here as any experience with an app which works reliably.

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This looks amazing, congratulations and thank you for making it FOSS. I was wondering if you are considering integrating with Home Assistant.

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Thanks

No, did not occur to me. What would the integration look like? Connecting it to the message bus to receive location updates? Honestly it is a couple years ago I played with HA.

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Is that true even if you're not in hybrid mode?

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Location sensor would be a good minimum bar.

A custom card for your app that is just basically a iframe into your app with auth would also be pretty decent. Your version of a map looks really nice.

Maybe surfacing metrics of distance traveled or number of geolocations.

I'll have to install the app and play around with it to make other recommendations but those are the first things that come to mind.

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Maybe the wording is confusing in the Readme. Reitti will try to fetch the data from a configured photon instance first, if this does not return anything and you have Geocoding services configured, it will try them. There is actually no switch for hybrid mode or only local. It depends on what is configured.

Photon Only: you have only photon configured and under Settings > Gecoding you deleted or disable every available service.
Hybrid Mode: Photon is configured and under Settings > Geocoding there are Services available. That es is the one I use. Having Photon with the data for Germany and all the rest is handled by Geoapify.com.

External Only: You dropped Photon from the docker-compose file and only rely on services under Settings > Geocoding

If you do not configure anything, then Reitti will skip Geocoding and only display Unknown Place.

I will update the Readme to make that clear.

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Very very cool! I see that you can import GPX files: can you also do the opposite, i.e., export a GPX file for a selected time range?

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I was thinking about that, but the main problem is that we do not store all the data which comes in.

If we ingest data from an app, I am pretty sure that the quality of the data is actually usable. But for example if we import an Records.json from Google Takeout. The quality of the earlier years is somewhat sketchy. For this we filter out some points like travelling with over 2000 km/h, sudden direction changes etc and they are lost forever. At least for Reitti they are unknown.

The feature would need a lot of explanation why the data we export is not the same we import.That is the reason I did not implemented it even if it would come in handy for testing stuff. Handling GPX files is a pita ...

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If you do not configure anything, then Reitti will skip Geocoding and only display Unknown Place.

Ah ok thanks. This is what I was wondering.

Two follow-ups:

Can you specify multiple COUNTRY_CODEs? (and if so, is the method

environment:
  - COUNTRY_CODE=country_one
  - COUNTRY_CODE=country_two

or

environment:
  - COUNTRY_CODE=[country_one, country_two]

or something else?)

And is this something that can seemlessly be retroactively changed? For example, if I set COUNTRY_CODE=au and it works fine for Australia, but then I move to NZ, can I add (assuming the answer to my first question is yes) or change to COUNTRY_CODE=nz and have all the NZ locations work on the already-recorded data, even if I made that change to my configuration after I had been in NZ for a few months?

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Good question, afaik you can not enter multiple countries to Photon. I was hoping it would be possible but everything i saw was it is either one country or the whole world. But maybe you can have a look here: https://github.com/komoot/photon
That is the service we are using.

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Visually this is gorgeous

Really nice work!

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Not sure if you know about it and I haven't used it myself yet, but being able to create native executables could be relatively easy with this

https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/reference/packaging/native-image/index.html

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I used that once on a past gig and it wasn't very pleasant to use. Especially in combination with spring boot. But that is a couple of years ago. Maybe things have changed. I personally would prefer the executable jar from spring boot. With that you do not have to make that many steps to make it work. But thanks for the suggestion

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Introducing reitti: a selfhosted alternative to Google Timeline