Most people want this map for one of two reasons: to look back at where they have travelled, or to find out how much of their own city they have never set foot in. Those want different tools. Here are the four honest options, and what each one is actually good at.
Both major phone platforms can keep a timeline of where you have been, and it is usually the most complete record available — often stretching back years before you thought to ask for one. Good at: retrospect. If the feature was on, you can look at last April. Bad at: shape. A timeline is a list of places and times, built for answering where were you on Tuesday, not how much have you covered. Check whether it is even enabled — on recent versions this history may be stored on the device rather than in an account, so it can be missing or partial without any warning.
Fitness apps record each walk or ride as a line, and many will draw all your lines on one map — a heatmap of your habits. Good at: distance, pace, and a genuinely striking picture after a year of use. Bad at: everything you did not deliberately record. A tracker only knows about the walks you remembered to start, and it measures how far you went rather than how much ground you know.
Drop pins by hand, on a custom map layer or one of the countries-and-cities visited services. Some let you shade whole regions. Good at: travel, at country and city scale, and at including the years before any of this was automatic. Bad at: resolution and honesty. Nobody hand-pins a street, and it is very easy to shade a country you passed through an airport in.
Start from a completely dark map and clear only the ground you physically visit. Nothing is pre-filled, and nothing can be shaded in by hand. Good at: the second question — how much of my own area have I actually seen? It gives you coverage rather than routes, and the answer is usually humbling. Most people's map is a bright knot around home and work with a great deal of black inside a fifteen-minute walk. Bad at: the past. A fog map starts the day you start it. There is no way to import the last ten years, and that is a real cost — but it is also why the map means something. Kartograf is this kind, and it runs in a browser: open /try and the first hole appears in the fog as soon as you move.
If you want the record of where you have travelled: pin map for the big scale, location history for the detail, and export the history early — these features change. If you want to know your own city: a fog map, and only a fog map. The others all begin with the world visible, which quietly answers the question before you ask it. There is no rule against both. They cost nothing to run in parallel, and they are measuring genuinely different things.
The map starts covered in fog
Walk, and it clears where you have been. Kartograf runs in your browser — no download, and the guest map needs no account.
Start your mapSeveral, working differently. Your phone's own location history is the most complete if it was switched on. Fitness apps map the walks you record. A fog-of-war map like Kartograf clears dark from the map wherever you go, which is the option that shows coverage rather than routes.
Start with your phone's location timeline, which may already hold years of data — check whether it is enabled and export it while you can. For a live map going forward, a fog map builds one continuously without you having to start and stop a recording.
A heatmap draws your routes brighter where you go often, on top of a fully visible map. A fog map hides everything you have not visited. The heatmap shows your habits; the fog map shows the size of what you have not explored.
Only by hand, or from an existing location history export. A fog map cannot be backfilled — it starts dark on the day you start it, which is the trade for the map being an honest record.
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