Look back on life · Less effort · Local-first
MeTrail · A footprint journal for looking back on life
MeTrail quietly saves arrivals, departures, dwell time, and the shape of your day. Weeks or months later, you can still trace it back without logging everything by hand.
Use maps, timelines, calendars, and place pages to piece time back together. Add photos, notes, tags, and automation hooks when a visit needs context, sharing, or a follow-up.
Core experience
Built around recall, organization, sharing, and lightweight automation, so your footprint history feels useful now and meaningful later.
Less manual work, fewer missed stops
MeTrail uses the iOS visit pipeline to save arrivals, departures, and dwell time for you, so everyday history keeps building without constant check-ins.
See how a day unfolded
Review the places, order, and movement of a day on the map when you want to reconstruct a commute, errand run, or trip.
Take your history with you
Filter and export visits as CSV, TXT, JSON, GPX, or KML for backup, analysis, migration, or long-term archiving.
Multi-device when you want it
Turn on iCloud and iCloud Drive only if you need them. Staying local-first is always an option, even when sync exists.
Jump back to any day
Move from today to last month through timeline, week, and month views without losing context or digging through loose fragments.
Find the places that matter
Group recurring places with favorites, tags, colors, and filters, then open each place together with its full visit history.
Turn routes into something readable
Generate cards with maps and summaries for friends, teammates, or your own archive when a trip deserves more than a raw screenshot.
Let visits trigger follow-ups
Set rules by place, time window, and frequency, then send events to Bark, Feishu, webhooks, and more through Hook Automation.
Save the thought that belonged there
Drop a short note into a visit and pair it with photos, notes, or to-dos while the moment is still fresh.
Use cases
Instead of vague praise, these are three practical patterns: recapping trips, recovering ordinary days, and sending arrival or departure events into a workflow.
After a trip
Common use case
For travel and business trips
“I let MeTrail run quietly during the day, then at night the map and timeline give me the exact order of stops and how long each one lasted. It saves me from rebuilding a trip out of photos, receipts, and half-remembered messages.”
Use case · Trip recap
On ordinary weekdays
Common use case
For commutes and errands
“Most weekdays do not feel important enough to log on purpose. A few weeks later, though, MeTrail can still tell me where I went after work, which stop I made on the way, and how long that whole loop actually took.”
Use case · Everyday recall
When alerts need to go somewhere
Common use case
For family and team follow-ups
“Once arrival and departure events start flowing to Bark, Feishu, or a webhook, MeTrail stops being just a journal. It quietly becomes the trigger that sends the next reminder, update, or heads-up on time.”
Use case · Automation follow-up
Inside the app
These 12 screens show how MeTrail records visits, rebuilds timelines, organizes places, and lets you export or share what matters.
Open any card for a closer look.
Open the app and see where you went, how long you stayed, and how the day moved from place to place.
Add a thought while the moment is still vivid so the visit keeps some feeling, not just coordinates and timestamps.
Step through every stop and movement in order when you want to recap a commute, a trip, or a packed day.
Tap a place on the map to open photos, tags, notes, and quick actions with the right context around that stop.
Jump between week and month layouts to find a specific day fast and rebuild a half-forgotten stretch of time.
Sort recent visits by activity type and see where your time has really been going lately.
Review the countries and cities you have covered, whether you are looking back on travel or everyday range.
Visit counts, dwell time, and recurring places are grouped automatically so longer patterns stop hiding in the raw data.
Package maps, routes, and highlights into a single card that is easier to send or save than a collection of screenshots.
Export visits and attachments by format or time range when you need backup, analysis, or migration to another tool.
Search by place, tag, note, or combined filters to find the stop you remember only vaguely at first.
Pin important places for faster return, then keep photos, notes, and tasks attached to the same context.
FAQ
Covers setup, battery impact, automation, privacy, exports, device migration, and the way visit recording actually works.
MeTrail depends on the iOS visit mechanism to recognize arrivals and departures, so “Always” plus Precise Location keeps records flowing while your phone is locked. It is not nonstop GPS tracking, and daily battery use typically stays around 3-5%.
Yes. You can keep reminders inside the app, or use `More > Settings > Tools > Hook Automation` to send events to Bark, Feishu, WeCom, Telegram, or your own HTTP endpoint with rules by place, time window, and frequency.
Start with four checks: iOS notification permission, Focus mode, Background App Refresh, and the in-app arrival/departure switches. If you use Hook Automation, open the log center to inspect each send result and retry failures.
You can export data manually, or turn on iCloud Sync plus iCloud Drive backup. On a new device, sign into the same Apple ID and enable sync, or restore from the files you exported yourself.
By default, it does not. Visits, places, photos, and notes stay inside the device sandbox with no third-party trackers. Data leaves the device only when you choose to share, export, or enable iCloud for your own private storage.
MeTrail saves the arrival first and fills in dwell time after iOS confirms that you actually left. That usually happens once you reach the next place and stay briefly, so departure details can show up a little later.
Open the place detail and adjust the pin, widen the flexible boundary, or refresh the address. Large campuses, malls, and parks often need a quick correction because the area itself is broad.
CSV works well for spreadsheets, TXT for plain backups, JSON for structured processing, and GPX or KML for map tools and geographic archives. MeTrail supports all five.
MeTrail loads history in pages instead of pushing everything into memory at once. Photos and attachments are usually what consume storage, so you can clean them up or back them up through iCloud Drive when needed.
Ready when you are
Set it up once and let MeTrail record quietly in the background. Later, you can retrace a day, archive a trip, or send arrival and departure events where they need to go.
Requires iOS 17.4 or later. Background logging, notifications, and automation depend on system permissions.
What you get
