Showing photos on a map has long been a request to the Google Photos team – someone even created a third-party app for it – until Google finally rolled it out, along with Photos’ redesigned three-tabbed design. While this new interface was perfect for seeing every nook and cranny of the world where you took photos, it didn’t tell the full story of your journey from one place to another. Now Photos has integrated Maps timeline, so you can see how you traveled each day and where your photos were taken.
The integration is live in Photos v5.23.0 and above. You can see it when you go to the Search tab open Your card in the Place section. A new warning box says your timeline has been added to the map, with a link to a support page explaining how the location of your photos is analyzed. You will have to zoom in a bit to see the first daily path, but after that it should be easier to pinch and zoom through your city / country / world and see the routes you took every day and all the photos you snapped .
Tapping the blue path will bring up a tooltip explaining what it is. You can tap that again to get to the settings (which can also be accessed from the three-dot overflow menu in the top right). There you can turn off timeline integration in Photos.
With this addition, Photos and Maps share tighter integration than ever before. You can already see all your daily movements in the Maps app timeline and all the photos you took at each stop, but that UI focuses more on the movement aspect than the photo. With Photos, the interface puts your photos and visual memories first.
