RemoteDash My Tracks is a web application that maps your travels and photos. It is free and viewable with any type of display device that can connect
to the Internet such as a PC, tablet, or mobile phone. My Tracks requires a free subscription with RemoteDash if you want to view your own maps(tracks). A subscription
is not required to view tracks others have shared with you.
My Tracks accesses the tracks and geotagged photos from the subscriber's Google Drive. The GPS track
must be a gpx, kml, or kmz file. These files can be generated in many ways, but the most typical way is with the use of your mobile phone. There are hundreds of
of GPS tracking and logging apps (many are free) on Google Play and Itunes that can generate these files.
Although not required to map your track, geotagged
photos (photos with latitude and longitude information) enhance your experience with My Tracks. Any geotagged photo that exists in the same Google Drive directory
as the track file (gpx, kml, or kmz) will be mapped by My Tracks. If you want, you can also map all the photos in a Google Drive directory without a GPS track. It is common to
use My Tracks for mapping photo albums only.
A typical user experience with My Tracks could be the mapping of a family vacation or day out including
capturing all the photos from the day's experience. To do this, all that is required is to optionally start the tracking/logging app you have selected for your mobile phone, and then
optionally to take photos along the way. At the end of the day, turn off the app and move the photos and/or track to Google Drive. On most phones, the tracks and photos can
be moved to Google Drive with one touch or even automatically as the track concludes or the photo is taken. If you subscribe, RemoteDash will then grab this Google Drive data
and display it.
RemoteDash My Tracks is a convenient and fun way to relive and recall your life experiences. Your data is stored and protected on Drive, and should last for a lifetime.
It's easy. Just get a free subscription with RemoteDash which you can do at mytracks.remotedash.com . If you want to create and share your own tracks and mapped photo albums, you will also need to authorize RemoteDash read access to your Google Drive which you have the option to do when you subscribe. If you want to create tracks, you will need to install a GPS tracking or logging app on your phone. There are hundreds in Google Drive and Itunes. Just make sure it saves gpx, kml, or kmz files. Also make sure your phone or other camera is setup to location tag your photos.
There really is only one prerequisite: the phone app stores the GPS data in gpx, kml, or kmz format. If it doesn't we can't use it. Beyond that it is kind of up to your personal tastes. Maybe you track fitness data, so you want an app that does that. Maybe you hike a lot, so you want an app that is designed for that, and so on and so on. There are hundreds of apps out there. For me, I was using Google My Tracks because it worked on my phone (an Android), it was free, was versatile enough to track all sorts of activities from driving to slow walks, had a simple non-buggy interface, and made it very easy to move the kmz file up to Google Drive. Google shut down My Tracks on April 30,2016, probably because there are tons of competing apps, and it did not seem to be a perfect complement to Google Fit. No matter, I spent a few days testing apps and found many that met my requirements. I am currently using Geotracker by Bogdanovich. It's working well on my Android and I just found it easiest to use. It's free so I donated to the developer and I'm happy. I am sure you can find one that you are happy with as well.
No. You don't need an account if you are just looking at others tracks and photos. You do need an account if you want to store and access your own tracks and photos. I've found Google accounts to be great as they offer 15 Gig of free cloud storage and lots of neat and useful apps. Also you don't have to have Gmail, you can just use your regular email account to setup a Google account. Go here to set one up. It's free.
Yes. The recipient of any of your tracks does not need an account with either RemoteDash or Google. They can access your data by a coded link that you send them. It is better if they have a RemoteDash My Tracks account because the track can be shared internal to RemoteDash which eliminates the requirement to use a link.
Geotagging refers to any item that is tagged with location information. In our case the photos you use must be tagged with at least latitude and longitude. Often the photos will also contain GPS altitude information.
First your phone must have a GPS chip in it, which almost all smart phones do nowadays. If it does, then all you have to do is change your phone's camera settings to enable location tagging. On an Android Samsung 5S, you simply open your camera app, select Settings , and then find location tagging and turn it on. It should be similar on any phone.
Sure but we won't be able to add any value to your photos so we don't import them. Only the tracks (kmz, kml, and gpx) will be imported and displayed.
By placing them in the same Google Drive directory as your track.
Sure. One of the primary things we do is map photo albums without a track. All you have to do is put photos specific to an area or trip in the same Google Drive directory and we will map all of them on the same map. To get the photo album into My Tracks, just go to the menu item "Import Tracks" when you are logged into My Tracks. If you are on Google Drive, right click on any photo in the Drive directory you want to import. Select Open with "RemoteDash My Tracks Geotagger" and we import the Drive photos and information related to the directory.
When it is used in reference to RemoteDash My Tracks, a track is a kmz, kml, or gpx file. It also could be a directory in Google Drive that you imported (see FAQ 10.). In this case the track is all the photos in the directory. It will have the same name as the Google directory.
By right-clicking on any .jpg, .gpx, .kml or .kmz file in Google Drive and selecting Open with "RemoteDash My Tracks Geotagger". You have to authorize RemoteDash access to your Google Drive first which you can easily do when you subscribe to RemoteDash My Tracks or later from the Tools menu of My Tracks.
If you have been forwarded a track link you will gain Guest access and can subscribe from the Settings menu. You can also subscribe at mytracks.remotedash.com and tracks.remotedash.com.
It's free. We also have no advertising and don't share your information with anybody.
Yes we have costs. We have servers we need to maintain and developers that need to be paid. We are hoping that if people use our system, that they will support us by donating a little something.
Maybe. The problem is the photos bloat the size of the track file and make the file very difficult to import and work with. It makes a lot more sense to handle the photos separately as we do, by placing them in the same directory as the track file. It's possible to hack the gpx,kml, or kmz file and remove the photos, but I don't know of any tools to do this. If you unzip a kmz file you should get access to all the photos in a separate "images" directory under the root directory of the kmz file.
It should be easy. I use an app (Geotracker for an Android) that directly allows you to export your track file to Drive after the track concludes. Others may save the file to internal memory (SD card), and once it is there there should be utilities that allow you to share the file to Drive. The same goes for photos. From the camera app on my Android I can directly export to Drive. Even easier, there are apps that can sync your folders on your phone to Drive. I use an app( I think it was around $3) that syncs my photo folder with a folder on Drive. So if you look into it a little bit, you should find many ways to move your tracks and photos to Drive very easily.
Only if Google Drive goes away. I don't know Google's plans, but if Google Drive goes away something unpredictable has happened. We do store a copy of the track in our servers, but we do not store the photos. We don't store your information either other than your login email address, your Google display name, and your encrypted password. If you donate, we don't save any of your credit card or personal information.
Yes. Although we store a copy of the track on our servers, we access track metadata from your Drive that allows us to identify the local track. We will display the local copy to expedite things. One of the principal ideas is that your data is stored on Google, which probably has a better chance of a long life than RemoteDash :). Maybe at some later date we may choose to copy the Drive photos and tracks to our servers to expedite things, but that would require us to create a scalable cloud storage like Drive and I just don't see doing that unless the import process from Drive becomes very slow.
Only if you let them. When you share a track, a coded link is provided that allows the recipient to access the track through RemoteDash. The access is limited to the track itself and thumbnails of the geotagged photos on the track. The recipient does not gain access to your Drive, but they do gain access to the track and thumbnails through RemoteDash. Optionally, you can authorize a user to gain read-access to the directory on your Drive that contains the track and photos, but you have to select this option with each track you share. When you do allow read access to your Drive directory, the recipient will then get full read access to the photos and all the files in the directory, not just the thumbnails. At any time you can disable the share link so that users can no longer gain access to the track and thumbnails through RemoteDash.