I am an information hoarder and liked the Foursquare swarm app for checking into restaurants and other interesting places when I travel, because I love seeing the pins on the map of the places I have been and remembering places later. I have scripts running to download my check-ins and store them in a self hosted map.
But I obviously don’t need to keep giving them my location data. Are there any self hosted alternatives with that kind of international database of places?
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If you like to checkin manually to places, there’s PrivateSquare which will query places around you from Foursquare (so, 4sq will still see whereabout you are), but store the actual checkin in a local database.
If you want some automated tracking, I’m mostly happy with OwnTracks which logs to my DaWarIch instance. (I’ve previously used Traccar and php-owntracks-recorder.)
While I don’t see any battery usage from OwnTracks, my only gripe is that it can’t increase the amount of points logged when it detects movement because of Apple iOS limitations.
(For iOS, there’s also Geory which will log into a local database and CAN increase the logging by spawning a Live Activity. It gives me the most accurate logs so far. But they have to be exported manually to be stored elsewhere and the author wants to keep the app simple and doesn’t want to implement logging to external systems.)
Every single (opensource) automated location tracker I’ve tried drained battery to the point where it is borderline useful.
Your best bet is to use something like Immich like others mentioned but it lacks specific business data like Google Timeline has, which I don’t think it’s possible with anything else.
How about Dawarich?
https://github.com/Freika/dawarich
I haven’t used it myself, but I have it in the backlog of things to try out
For tracking my own location, I have tried out Traccar once. It works without any foreign data stores.
I don’t know of such an alternative. A quick solution would be to use something like GeoNotes to take geolocated notes.
As far as a self-hosted solution goes, I’d just like to point out that you wouldn’t need a self-hosted database of places. You could query Ouverture (or Google, OSM, etc.) for places near you, and you’d just need to store the check-in on your server with a basic API. This is an interesting problem, and not super hard to implement.
I’ve heard that immich and other picture-organizing software can will something like this?
I was going to say the same. It’s wonderful.
Immich is pretty good for this if you take pictures at each location. It has a global map that shows all your photos with a heatmap-style display and a drawer that shows a grid of the photos within your viewport as you can and zoom around. It doesn’t seem like you can view a specific album on the map currently but you can at least filter the map to favorites or a date range.
