A free app that displays your location on trail maps and lets you view your past routes.
This app helps you find your current location on a local offline trail map. Trail maps often include more detailed information than regular maps, such as local landmarks, trail names, distances, surface types, and steepness.
To get started, import your trail map by selecting an image or PDF from Photos, sharing it from Safari, or downloading a JSON file with predefined map links and anchor points.
If it hasn’t been done already, you’ll need to mark three fixed anchor points on the map. While this setup requires some precision, it’s worth the effort — the app can provide an estimated location within about 10 km (6 miles) from the center of your chosen anchors.
You can test how accurate your setup is by displaying a GPX file from a previous hike, or a hike from Apple Health.
The ideolocator gives some visual feedback on accuracy: Orange indicates the position is more than 10 km off, red means the error exceeds 50km.
This app is designed for fun — accuracy isn’t guaranteed. The precision depends on how well you place the anchors, and the map itself may have inaccuracies.
The app also supports loading and exporting JSON files containing anchor and image information. See here for some JSON files already prepared.
Why I wrote this: I couldn’t find a free app that did exactly this, and I was curious about the coordinate mappings needed to make this work, and I was was curious has to how accurate the maps actually are. Some are not very accurate…
Contact us!
To contact us, use the social media links above, or this form below.