I personally use Polarsteps and I like it. This is a map-centric travel tracker. The encouraged way to use it is to have the mobile app that records all the locations that other apps on your phone have been fetching, to create a smoother line following your driving/hiking route. I personally like how it detects flights on your route. If you prefer, you can manually add your steps. For each step (placed in a specific location, inside a city for example), you can add photos and text.

Then you have a map of all of your trips, which can be zoomed. If you also like numbers, if shows how many countries and continents you have traveled, even though it is more an aesthetic way of displaying travels rather than a list of numbers/awards/badges.

You also have a map that shows each trip, with a timeline of all your steps. They make money mostly by printing a book of a trip of yours, but you don’t have to, you can share your trips online with peers, family, friends.

Here is a screenshot of the overall world map with some trips

I’ve tried a few IOS apps, none of which were very good. I’m going to have to try all the things in the other answers.

I have used GPX Tracker on iPhone and GPS/cell-enabled iPad¹ and give it four stars of five. The missing one is because for some unknown reason, the pause/resume button is less sensitive than buttons in other apps. I also liked Motion-X but not as much as GPS Tracker. Have also carried two different Garmin devices on a few trips.

All four allow me to download GPX files and upload those to GPS Visualizer (or another local or web-based app). And that allows me to see the path on various maps and/or download it to view after their copy expires (24 hours). Or upload to my own website if I want to share it.  GPS Visualizer also has some other tools that occasionally are useful.

If you want to edit your paths, there are many sites that will let you draw from nothing or edit an uploaded path.  I’ve used Scribble Maps and a Wiki that I’ve forgotten the name of.

I’ve also forgotten the name of a site that would take a bunch of uploaded images with GPS in EXIF and put them on a map.

I also keep a sort of diary (physical book), and occasionally blog excerpts from it. But it’s pathetically incomplete, because traveling is a lot more fun than writing about it!

¹Irritating that I have to pay for a cell radio if I want GPS. 🙂

Location data is popular topic of the QuantifiedSelf and health tracking communities. Google Checkout / Maps is commonly used. More interestingly, many use Overland, which is open source, respects privacy, is customizable and integrates with health tracking.

Unfortunately these do not have a picture or note taking feature. As previously mentioned there are Journaling apps that can do that. For example, tlcbot though its more about analysis of journal text, not travel.

I recently put together a simple website to do exactly this. It’s called Moment Mapper. It uses instagram photos that have been “added to the photo map”. You log in with instagram and slowly your location enabled photos will trickle in and start appearing on the map. Any new photos you post on instagram will show up immediately. I’d love to have some test users and get feedback.

You can:

• View instagram photos and captions on an interactive map
• Filter by date range
• Filter by tag
• View fullscreen slideshow of the current photos on the map
• Share your custom url with anyone so they can see your photos

If you are using the Google system of applications and mobile tools; it will automatically create a nice collection of related photos for you.

If all you want is a nice “storybook” of your travels, this is another options that is available for free and (most importantly for me) does not require any input from you. It just happens in the background automatically.

The feature is called stories and this article on Google’s help site explains how it works and how to enable it.

I really think its quite elegant because it includes maps and photos (plus you are able to add your own annotations to it).

Try the Fog of World app for iOS. This displays satellite imagery of the world shrouded in fog; as you travel, the “fog” dissipates from your path, showing you where you’ve been. I believe you can also add photos to the map, although I’ve never tried that. I find it fun to keep track of my travels this way.

Note that while Fog of World lets you back up your data to various cloud storage services, it’s in an opaque format, so it’s not clear how you would get your data out of the app if you wanted to. It also uses your device’s GPS heavily, so your battery may run down more quickly.

You could also look into a journaling app like Day One. It supports geotagged entries with text, photos, or both, although for some reason there’s no way to see all of your entries on a map.

EDIT

PolarSteps

I have found PolarSteps to be the best option currently available. You can track trips in real-time as well as add old trips. You can add notes, images, sights, landmarks for each step along the way.

Another really great feature is that you can get your trip printed as a hardback book for a small fee. It’s really amazing.

Out-of-date

It also took me some time to find a viable provider but after tedious searching I found Travelog.

Features

• Plan your future trips and look at popular destinations
• Log your planned trips on the go using their app
• Upload travel albums
• follow/get followed by other travellers

It’s a very good service except it lacks one fundamental feature; the ability to log/record trips you have done prior to using Travelog.

Moves is a very good app to track where you have been. It gives you a daily overview of your route on a map, the places you have visited and the distance you covered. I use it when on a city trip, so I can look up again the places I’ve visited. It does not drain your battery at all (at least not on my iPhone 5S), so definitely worth a try.

edit: It also works well offline: routes are somewhat less detailed (you’ll sometimes see a straight line instead of the road you’ve followed).

This was exactly what dopplr.com used to do. When they went under, I threw together http://dopplr.org to allow for pretty much the same thing.

It doesn’t allow you to take notes, though. But I’m very open to suggestions on how to increase usability 🙂

Edit: dopplr.org has a basic API that allows you to use your past and future travels in other places.

As far as I’ve ever found there’s not something exactly like what you want, but there are a few workarounds.

Previously I used WorldMate, it’s more of an upcoming trip tracker rather than a where I’ve been but it does show you some of where you’ve been. There’s also TripIt which is similar. But they’re both heavily skewed for planning and tracking future travel (and selling you cars, hotels and outings).

There are a couple of basic travel map sites, TravBuddy has one and there’s WhereHaveIBeen.Info as well. But they’re basically just sites to color a map, and generally at the country level. For examples here’s the link to my TravBuddy map.

I’m actually surprised there’s not a site out there that’s more dedicated to this, maybe I’ve just never found it or maybe they always end up expanding into sales/reviews/etc.

BUT, there are a couple of ways you can get close to what you want yourself. First consider a photo sharing site like Flickr. Here you can tag photos with a location (your camera may already do it) and a time/date. Unfortunately I can’t get into the site at the moment but there definitely was a map view and I believe you can control whether your photos are public or private. So, you’d need at least one picture per location, but that would do what you want. Kind of.

Another alternative is Google My Maps which (if you have a Google account) allows you to save personal anotations on Google maps. So you can drop markers where you’ve been, make notes, and add pictures/video. You can share the map, or save it for yourself. Here’s the help pages which you can browse through to get an idea. This will not color in countries, and there’s no real date tracking.

Of course, if you have an Android device with location turned on, there’s also Location History (again that link is not working where I am but I’m pretty sure it’s right, someone can edit it for me if it’s not) which will track where you’ve been.

None of those cover everything you want to do, it would be possible to create a custom website that ties several of those together to get closer to a single travel tracking landing page, but I don’t know of any public site that’s done it.

A few people here have countries visited maps in their profile, so maybe there is a better solution out there.

EDIT: As David Richerby points out in the comments one drawback with most ‘color the map’ sites is that deciding what parts to separate is difficult. People disagree on what’s a country, and borders and countries change over time giving problems to update the map. I guess the best way would be a system that took ‘points on a map’ data and combined it with some external (constantly updated) list of borders to produce the colorized map. Which actually doesn’t seem too difficult if the data exists, it’s the sort of mash-up that gets thrown together in hackathons all the time.