How It Went: Turning GPS Tracks, Photos, and Videos into a Short Film

Key highlights: Your cycling or travel GPS tracks, along with the photos and videos you shot along the way, can be automatically assembled into a short film with animated tilted-map visuals — all processed locally on your phone or Mac.

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What This Tool Actually Does

How It Went can be summed up in one sentence: it turns existing activity data into a shareable narrative short film.

Its inputs are very clear — your existing GPS tracks (from Strava, Garmin FIT, or GPX files), photos on your phone, and clips from action cameras. The output is an MP4 file, available in 9:16 portrait or 16:9 landscape, assembled and encoded directly on iPhone, Android, or Mac, entirely locally.

This "existing footage in, finished short film out" positioning hits a real pain point: cyclists and travelers never lack material — what they lack is the time and tools to string that material into a story.

Three Product Details Worth Noting

The track draws itself

The core visual is a tilted-perspective map where the GPS track is progressively drawn as an animation. This "growing track" visual language is common in sports videos, but usually requires professional software like After Effects to create by hand. How It Went turns it into an automated process.

Tilted map is a common visual technique in track animations: a 2D map is tilted at an angle to simulate a 3D perspective, making the track line appear to extend across the ground rather than lie flat on the screen. This viewpoint enhances spatial depth and a sense of motion, and is commonly seen in products like Relive and Strava's Year in Review. Implementation typically requires a map rendering engine that supports a camera pitch parameter, along with interpolating the GPS coordinate sequence into a smooth animated path.

Photos and clips return to the "scene of the shot"

Each photo appears at the geographic location where it was actually taken, and video clips play at their capture points too. This means the organizing logic for material isn't a timeline but a spatial line — viewers see "where you shot what," not just "what you shot."

Spatial arrangement refers to using geographic coordinates rather than a timeline as the main axis for organizing material. Each photo or video clip is anchored to a specific location on the map through the GPS information in its EXIF (or by matching track timestamps), and is presented in sequence as the camera moves during playback. This approach requires the shooting location of the material to be correctly associated with track points, so it relies heavily on camera clock accuracy — which is why the product offers a clock correction feature.

Multi-day merging and clock correction

The product supports merging multi-day trips into a single film, with rest days preserved on the timeline. Another useful feature is camera clock correction: action camera clocks are often off, and after correcting one camera's clock, all footage it captured is automatically realigned to the correct time points.

Who It's For, and Who Might Be Disappointed

Good fit: Heavy Strava users, long-distance cyclists and hikers, and people who like organizing travel footage but don't want to learn editing software. Data sources cover Strava, Garmin devices, and generic GPX, so the import barrier is low.

Might not be enough for: Video creators who need fine creative control. The product's current positioning is "automatic assembly"; the description doesn't mention custom transitions, soundtrack editing, or a subtitle system, so the finished style is likely template-based. For scenarios where you just want to quickly produce and share a video, this is an advantage; for creators who want a personal style, it's a limitation.

What Local Computation Means

The official website explicitly states that assembly and encoding are completed on iPhone, Android phones, or Mac. This choice has two implications:

• Privacy: GPS tracks and photos are highly sensitive personal data, so not uploading to the cloud is a clear plus.
• Engineering: Completing video encoding on mobile devices requires performance optimization, which usually means the development team has done considerable work under the hood — and explains why it prioritizes the iOS and macOS ecosystem.

It should be noted that the Product Hunt page doesn't disclose specific technical implementation details; the above is reasonable inference based on the product description.

Local video encoding refers to completing video rendering and compression directly on the device rather than relying on a server. Mobile devices typically use hardware encoders (such as VideoToolbox on iOS and MediaCodec on Android) to accelerate H.264/H.265 encoding, but map rendering and track animation compositing still consume CPU/GPU resources. Local processing avoids the bandwidth cost of uploading large footage and eliminates cloud storage privacy concerns, but is limited by device performance — processing time for long videos or high-resolution output may be lengthy.

Its Place: Between Sports Apps and Editing Software

How It Went occupies an interesting category. Strava and Garmin Connect provide data but don't do visual storytelling; CapCut and similar editors do editing but don't understand GPS tracks; Relive-style products do 3D track animations but usually rely on the cloud. How It Went bundles three things together — "track visualization + spatial material positioning + local encoding" — forming a relatively distinct niche.

The success of such tools often depends not on how many features they have, but on whether the first-use output is something people are willing to share. Judging from the product description, its design clearly leans toward "out-of-the-box shareable video."

Summary

How It Went solves a specific, verifiable problem: turning activity data scattered across multiple apps and devices into content that can be published directly. Its technical approach (local processing, multi-format compatibility, spatial arrangement) is clear, and its target users are well-defined. For cyclists and travelers who habitually record tracks, this is a tool worth watching; for video creators pursuing creative freedom, it's more of a starting point than an endpoint.