SoloSquareTHE DETAILS BEHIND YOUR LITTLE WORLD
How your travel map works.
A simple city map, with your data under your control.
Updated 18 October 2026 · SoloSquare product team
What a pin means
A pin represents a city center, not a precise address or a live location. Visited and Wishlist are self-reported choices. A city has one state and an optional visit year between 1900 and the current year. Repeat trips, dates, notes, photos and routes are not recorded in this version.
The map and city catalog
We reuse our bundled Natural Earth 1:50m country outlines in the Equal Earth projection. WGS84 longitude and latitude are projected with the same formula for pins and outlines. Exported images, HTML and video use those same coordinates. Map providers do not supply the identity of your pins. Borders are simplified; small islands may need zooming, and the Pacific is split at the date line.
The search catalog uses GeoNames cities15000, which includes cities above its population threshold and administrative capitals, supplemented with SoloSquare guide destinations. We omit historical, abandoned and city-section records, retain city IDs, country codes, regions and IANA timezones, and deduplicate matching guide places. GeoNames data is used under CC BY 4.0; Natural Earth is public domain. This is not an exhaustive gazetteer.
What we count
Visited cities and wishlist cities are counted separately. Countries & territories is the number of unique country codes among visited cities. It is not a sovereign-country score or a statement that an entire country has been explored. Each map supports up to 1,000 cities.
Saving and restoring
The editor saves in browser local storage when available. No travel-map account, server trip database or cross-device sync exists. A signed-in SoloSquare member uses the same local tool; signing in does not sync it. Clearing site data, private browsing, storage eviction or changing devices may lose your map. Use Backup to download a versioned JSON file; Import validates the file and opens a preview. Adding it merges new cities and preserves your existing status for cities already on your map. A change in another tab is surfaced, and Undo reverses the last edit in this session.
Sharing deliberately
The share preview excludes wishlist cities by default. Enable Include my wishlist to share them. Links encode the selected snapshot in the URL fragment, which is not sent to our web server as part of the request. The editor clears the fragment after reading it. Links still contain the data: recipients, messaging services, browser history or browser extensions may retain them. Anyone with a link or exported file can see the included cities and optional years. A shared map never silently replaces the recipient’s saved map. Links above the practical size limit are refused; HTML and JSON are available instead.
Design your share
The share studio has five layouts: Map poster, Travel portrait, Passport, Highlights and Compass. Combine them with Pins, Dots or Countries graphics and Atlas, Midnight, Paper, Lagoon or Rose colors. Fit my places frames every included city; Whole world keeps a global overview. Collections spanning the date line use a whole-world view so no included city disappears. Up to ten city labels are placed where they fit; Compass labels the geographic extremes. All included city markers remain visible. Country filters and wishlist inclusion affect only this share, not your saved collection.
Travel portrait includes an illustrated cover or a photo you choose. JPG, PNG and WebP photos up to 10 MB and 40 megapixels are decoded locally, resized and redrawn to remove file metadata. The photo and optional name stay in this tab and the image, video or HTML you download. They are not uploaded, stored in your city backup or put in a map link. Flags are bundled from flag-icons under its MIT license.
Images, video and offline files
PNG exports are 1080 × 1920 for Stories, 1080 × 1350 for portrait posts or 1080 × 1080 for square posts. The preview, PNG, HTML artwork and video use the same selected design. Videos are silent 1080 × 1920, approximately 7.5 seconds, recorded locally using the browser’s supported MP4 or WebM encoder. Keep the tab visible during recording. WebM may need conversion before a social app accepts it; where recording is unavailable, use the image or HTML export. Pins appear in a presentation sequence, not a claimed trip order or flight route.
The HTML export embeds the selected artwork and full city lists, with no executable scripts or external assets. Its external links need a connection. JSON is the editable backup format. Creating a map initially needs internet to load the site and catalog; keeping the already loaded tab open lets you continue locally. This is not an installed offline application.
Privacy and limitations
City search and map editing run in your browser after the public catalog downloads. The Tools surface loads no analytics or advertising code. Ordinary web hosting logs may record page and asset requests. There is no GPS permission, photo scan, background tracking or automatic travel inference. Share exports are created on your device and are not uploaded by this tool. See the SoloSquare Privacy Policy for the wider service.
We reviewed public travel-map products to understand useful interactions. This is an independent implementation and is not affiliated with Pin Traveler or Airbnb. Generated editorial artwork is illustrative; the functional map uses geographic data. No search ranking, social reach or assistant recommendation is promised.