This is something that’s not technically possible at the moment, due to iPhones not having enough memory to cope with that much data being added to the map all at once.

Already the yearly and monthly map views need to make use of “simplified” versions of the timeline items, to reduce the amount of data put onto the map and into memory. The yearly views also take quite a long time to load on older phone models, and can potentially crash the app due to memory consumption on older phones (and even newer phones, if the year has a large amount of data!).

To do a map of all data for all years, it would require much more aggressive “simplification” of the timeline items, taking much more detail out of the path lines. That’s doable, but it would remain to be seen whether that would be enough to reduce the memory consumption to a safe level.

Still, if enough people are interested, I could do some experiments and see what’s possible!

I miss this from moveoscope

Maybe this could be done like a simplified “coloured surface” on the globe rather than a complex “spider web” of all travels.

Every new voyage would colour some parts of the world.

This would really be a great feature. Used this a lot on Moves/Moveoscope. If too difficult on the phone it could also be through a separate web site and perhaps an extra payment for access to that.

Ooh I love the simplified colored surface idea. For my travels I still use MotionXGPS because I can easily open it up again when I’m in a city or country again and see where I haven’t been!

So perhaps there is a way to only load either (A) the data for one particular geographic region, eg the zoomed in map location and/or (B) massively simplified data so that you can see colors in regions you’ve been in the world/country/zoomed out location

This should be doable on newer phones, my iPhone 12 has no issues loading the yearly view, I’m sure showing 2 or 3 years at a time would also be doable.

For a full history I’ve found that

https://erik.github.io/derive/

Works really well with the gpx exports from start to finish, it even does more than the ~year that quantified app does. I wish it showed types but maybe incorporating some of what was done here could also help with the heat map suggestion since the code is on GitHub

For the memory issues, what about breaking down the location data into a tally of longitude and latitude blocks, to a certain precision.

I should note that the precision that would be useful to me is the 2km-20km scale range on google maps.

Only entries into a block should be tallied. If one is already in a block, it should not be tallied.

Alternatively doing only a single tally per block per day would also suffice

Now that I think about it, for my use case, of just knowing where I have and have not been, I don’t actually need a hear map, just an on/off marker for the lat/long blocks: which is simple enough to offer a fair amount of precision.

@matt, would it be possible to make some kind of offline web service, where this would be possible? Seen in the light of privacy, i think of an web service app to install locally, and to which it would be possible to sync all the iPhone data to

Currently I import my lifetime history from the Arc monthly backups into Guru Maps (another iOS app), and Guru seems to have no issues displaying the entire lifetime history at once on my iPhone (among 100,000km of assorted other GPX tracks I have from other projects). https://gurumaps.app/

They’re pretty nice in their Telegram chat, maybe we could ask how they achieve it technically and do the same in Arc?

I just had a play with Guru Maps, and it looks like they’re possibly using a [much] older version of Mapbox, that uses raster tiles instead of vector maps. Though that wouldn’t fully explain how they’re getting away with loading much larger amounts of path data into memory / onto the map.

It’s possible they’ve just spent a lot more time optimising their code for very large datasets.

I’m just waiting for export by type so I can use derive :’) which is my interim visualizer haha

https://erik.github.io/derive/

Tim, definitely vote for any feature suggestions here that sound close to “export by type”! And it’s probably worth mentioning it on the support forum whenever I post a new poll too, because I do take into account what people are talking about on the forum, as well as what’s highly voted here.