Reitti: A Self-Hosted Google Timeline Alternative with Built-In Open-Source Street View

The self-hosted, privacy-first location tracking tool Reitti has received a wave of updates. As an open-source alternative to Google Timeline, it transforms raw GPS points recorded by your devices into visited places, trips, and a life timeline — with all data staying on your own server. Developer Daniel shared a month's worth of improvements in the r/selfhosted community on Reddit, with the most notable addition being a built-in open-source street view.

Core Mission: Keep Your Location History in Your Own Hands

Reitti's purpose is clear — help users revisit the places they've been and the routes they've taken, without handing location data to any third party. The developer notes the project started as a personal tool for rekindling memories of past journeys, but community interest pushed it far beyond its original scope.

It works by receiving raw GPS tracks uploaded from your devices, then automatically distinguishing "visits" (time spent at a location) from "trips" (movement between locations) via a dwell detection algorithm — ultimately assembling a rewindable timeline. The database belongs to the user, and so does the history. That's the fundamental difference from cloud-based services.

Highlight Feature: Built-In Open-Source Street View

The biggest addition in this update is integration with Panoramax — a community-built, open-source street view platform. It's common to visit a place and forget to take photos. If a location has Panoramax coverage, you can now open street-level imagery directly from your timeline: click the photo sequence alongside a track and look around from ground level.

This design bridges "recording a route" and "reliving the scene." For privacy-conscious users who still want to preserve a sense of place, swapping Google Street View for an open-source alternative fits the project's philosophy perfectly — you get real-world imagery without relying on commercial map services.

Panoramax is an open-source street view platform initiated by France's National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information (IGN) with contributions from the OpenStreetMap community. Its imagery is published under open licenses — anyone can shoot and upload photos, and anyone can use them freely. Unlike Google Street View, Panoramax images aren't subject to commercial terms, and the project can be fully self-hosted. Coverage is currently concentrated in Europe (especially France), with higher density in cities and popular tourist destinations, and gaps in remote areas. For Reitti users, whether street view is available depends entirely on whether your location has been photographed and uploaded to Panoramax — it's not a global service.

UX Improvement: A Rebuilt Date Picker

Reitti's date selection had long drawn criticism, and the developer openly acknowledged it was warranted. The new version offers two approaches: a traditional picker with plain input fields, or bypassing the picker entirely to type things like yesterday, a localized date format, or a range like 2025 - 2026.

Other controls on the main page have also been consolidated into a single action bar for a cleaner interface. These seemingly minor interaction improvements are often what determine whether a self-hosted tool actually gets used long-term.

Algorithm Improvement: Dwell Detection for Battery-Saving Trackers

For users running OwnTracks in "significant-move mode," Reitti has improved its dwell detection logic. In this power-saving mode, the phone only reports data when significant movement is detected, then goes silent — resulting in sparse track data. The old algorithm occasionally missed stationary periods in sparse data, misclassifying a "visit" as a "trip."

The new algorithm correctly handles sparse data, accurately identifying visits and their duration, with no changes needed on the phone side. This is a meaningful improvement for mobile tracking scenarios where battery life matters.

OwnTracks is a popular open-source location tracking client for iOS and Android that reports GPS data to a self-hosted server via MQTT or HTTP. Its "significant-move mode" uses system-level cell tower and Wi-Fi positioning instead of continuous GPS polling, only triggering a report when the device detects notable displacement. Battery consumption is minimal, but the trade-off is that the interval between track points can stretch from seconds to minutes or even tens of minutes. This contrasts sharply with the dense, high-frequency data from MQTT mode, placing much greater demands on dwell detection algorithms that rely on point density.

Timeline Controls and Immich Integration

Several control features make the timeline better reflect real life:

• No-Visit Zones: Prevent transit stops and similar pass-through locations from being logged as "visits."
• Permanent Deletes: Deleted visit records won't reappear.
• Smoothed View: Kalman filtering applied at the rendering stage removes GPS jitter without touching the raw data.
• Custom Day Start: A walk home at 2 AM can be assigned to the evening it "feels like" it belongs to.

On the photo side, Reitti's Immich integration goes deeper. Album filtering lets you display photos from a specific album rather than your entire library; per-user photo sharing means you can decide — on a per-user basis — whether shared location data includes photos. Tracks visible, photos private, or vice versa.

The Kalman Filter is a recursive linear optimal estimation algorithm originally developed for aerospace navigation and now widely used in GPS signal smoothing. Consumer GPS signals are subject to atmospheric refraction, building multipath reflections, and other factors that cause random drift of several meters to tens of meters even when stationary — showing up as "jitter" on a track map. The Kalman filter produces a smoother estimated trajectory by combining current measurements with historical predictions (weighted by confidence), and applying it at the rendering layer means users see a clean, smoothed path while the original raw coordinates remain fully intact in the database for future reprocessing or export.

Immich is a self-hosted photo and video management platform often described as an open-source alternative to Google Photos, supporting automatic backup, facial recognition, map view, and more. Reitti's Immich integration allows users to link their location timeline with their local photo library — viewing photos taken during a visit alongside the location record itself, unifying place and visual memory in one place, with both datasets never leaving your own server.

A Security Fix That Deserves Attention

The developer disclosed a security issue discovered through responsible disclosure: on already-configured instances, a vulnerability in a setup flow could potentially be exploited to gain admin privileges. The issue has been patched and tests have been added. If your instance is exposed to the public internet and hasn't been updated recently, upgrade as soon as possible.

For self-hosted users, this is an important reminder — privacy-first only works if the instance itself is secure. Staying on top of security patches isn't optional.

Transparency About AI-Assisted Development

Worth noting: the developer proactively clarified AI's role in the project. AI is used as a tool to accelerate coding — handling boilerplate generation and problem-solving — but all code is reviewed, tested, and intentionally designed by a human. Architecture, logic, and quality standards are entirely human-led. This kind of clear-eyed disclosure about the boundaries of AI assistance is a transparency practice worth encouraging in the open-source world.

Project documentation is at dedicatedcode.com, with source code hosted on GitHub at dedicatedcode/reitti. For users looking to break free from cloud location services while preserving a complete record of their life's journeys, Reitti offers a viable path that doesn't sacrifice privacy for functionality.