Reitti v5.2.0 Release Notes

Hey everyone, Daniel here! 👋

I’m thrilled to bring you Reitti v5.2.0. This release is one of the most exciting updates yet—packed with features designed to make exploring your data more rewarding, your location sharing more private, and your photo library much better organized.

Before diving into what’s new, I want to dedicate this release to a very special companion: my cat Plüschi, who passed away recently after 16 wonderful years by my side. Fare well, little buddy. 🐾❤️

🌟 Key Highlights & What You Can Do With Them

1. Spatial Coverage: Turn Real-World Exploration Into a Game!

Have you ever wondered how much of your hometown you’ve actually walked, or what percentage of a country you explored during your last vacation?

Inspired by the "fog of war" mechanic in video games, the new Coverage feature maps out your real-world footprints into a dynamic cell grid layer:

• Gamify Your Daily Life & Travels: Open the brand-new Coverage dashboard to see the exact percentage of cities, regions, and countries you have uncovered. It's great motivation to take a different street on your evening walk or explore a new neighborhood!
• Travel Back in Time: Use historical sliders to watch your map reveal itself over time, reliving past road trips and milestones as your personal world map fills in.
• The Foundation for Smarter Stats: With this feature, Reitti becomes fully aware of OpenStreetMap (OSM) administrative areas! In the future, this unlocks incredible possibilities—like tracking uncovered countries over time or automatically listing visited cities directly in your Memories. We'll see what exciting ideas come to mind next, and if you have cool suggestions, please open up a discussion!
• Thank You: A massive shoutout to @Jonsen94, who originally pitched this vision and built the first prototype back during v3.0!

⚠️ Important Setup & System Requirements:

• To enable: Add SPATIAL_COVERAGE=true to your docker-compose.yml.
• Storage space: You will need around 10 GB of free disk space upfront (~5 GB temporary space during extraction, and ~5 GB permanent storage for the pre-built Paikka index).
• First-time indexing: When enabled, Reitti calculates coverage cells for your entire historical database. You can keep logging new locations normally, but it is heavy on the CPU—we recommend enabling this before bedtime so your server can crunch the initial calculations overnight. Older paths will show up once processing finishes!
• For step-by-step instructions, visit the Spatial Coverage Documentation.

2. "Live Location Only" Mode: Safety Without the History Log

Reitti is built on privacy, and this feature gives you fine-grained control over how family and friends share their whereabouts.

• The Problem: You might want to know when a family member is on their way home, or share an ETA with a friend, without building a permanent, searchable historical log of everywhere they go.
• The Solution: You can now switch any user to Live Data Only mode in their profile. Reitti will show their real-time pin on the map, but automatically discards past coordinates—giving you real-time peace of mind with complete historical privacy.
• Documentation: Learn how to configure this and manage your users in the new User Management Documentation.

3. One-Click Geotagging: Fix Photo Locations Directly in Immich

If you shoot photos on a dedicated camera (like a DSLR or mirrorless) or an older phone without GPS, your photo library often lacks location data.

• How It Works: Reitti looks at the exact timestamp a photo was taken and matches it against your GPS breadcrumb trail to pinpoint where you were standing.
• What You Can Do Now: Whenever you view a photo in Reitti's gallery or photo viewer, you'll see a button to write that estimated location permanently back to Immich!
• The Result: Your Immich albums, search filters, and world maps instantly become richer and accurately geotagged without needing manual coordinate tagging.
  (Note: Ensure your Immich API token has the asset.update permission enabled).

4. Bulk GPX Uploads for GPSLogger: Save Phone Battery

For Android users using GPSLogger (v136+), Reitti now supports uploading complete GPX log files at once instead of transmitting points one by one throughout the day.

• Why it matters: Fewer active network connections mean significantly less battery drain on your phone—especially during long day trips, hikes, or bike rides.
• You can easily apply this via the auto-configure button or by checking the integration guide in our documentation.

5. Quality of Life & Interface Refinements

• Decluttered Date Picker: Future dates are now hidden by default on the main page to keep navigation clean. (You can easily re-enable them anytime in Map Settings).
• Rename API Tokens: Give your tokens clear, descriptive names (e.g., "Daniel's Pixel Phone" or "Home Server Immich") directly from the API Tokens page.
• Smarter Address Labels: Enhanced parsing for Geoapify delivers cleaner, more recognizable place and city names in your timeline.

🛠️ Bug Fixes & Improvements

• Fixed an issue where the memory detail page map and photos wouldn't load (thanks to @Leppi83!).
• Improved stability when processing GPS points sent without accuracy metadata.
• Removed the legacy Quartz dependency and streamlined real-time updates (SSE) for smoother performance.
• General UI touch-ups and improved time formatting across the web app.
• Fresh translations thanks to our contributors on Hosted Weblate!

☕ Behind the Scenes

Getting this release out the door took significant optimization work. Making the spatial index run smoothly on low-power hardware (like Raspberry Pis and mini home servers) took 5 sub-releases of performance tuning—bringing initial indexing time down from 1,500 minutes to just 60 minutes!

On a personal note, developing the Immich integration finally motivated me to upgrade my personal instance from v1.142.1 straight to Immich v3, and the migration was wonderfully seamless.

Help Spread the Word!

Honestly, my true passion is writing code, optimizing spatial algorithms, and building cool tracking features, not playing social media manager on Reddit, Lemmy, or Twitter.

If you love using Reitti, the best way you can help is to tell people about it! Whenever you see someone on self-hosted forums asking for open-source Google Timeline alternatives, family location sharing, or Immich geotagging tools, drop a mention of Reitti.

"Me spending 14 hours optimizing H3 indexes instead of writing promo tweets."

Getting Started

The latest docker-compose.yml is available in the GitHub release assets.

• GitHub: Report issues & view source
• RSS: Stay updated by adding .atom to the end of our releases URL.
• Discuss: Join the conversation on Lemmy
• IRC: #reitti on libera.chat

If you have any questions, feel free to add them into the release discussion

Thank you all for being part of this journey. Happy tracking!

— Daniel