Stops
How to add destinations to your travel route
Destinations — also called stops — are the backbone of your animated travel map. This guide covers the three ways to add them, how to reorder and rename them, and a few tips to keep your route clean and readable.
Search by name
The fastest way is the search bar at the top of the sidebar. Type a city, region, country or famous landmark and pick a result. Travel Story Maker uses OpenStreetMap for geocoding so almost any named place on Earth works.
Click on the map
For a custom stop with no specific name — a viewpoint, a beach, the middle of a road trip — simply click on the map. A new stop appears at that exact coordinate. You can then rename it from the sidebar.
Paste coordinates
If you already have a latitude and longitude (from a GPS, a Google Maps share link or a flight tracker), paste them into the search bar in the format `lat, lng`. The stop is added at that exact point.
Reorder and rename
Drag a stop in the sidebar to change its position in the route. Double-click the title to rename it — useful when the auto-detected name is too long or in a language you do not want on the final video.
Best practices
Keep your route readable by spacing stops out. A 30-second animation typically shows 4 to 8 stops well — beyond that, viewers lose track.
- Group nearby points into a single stop when possible.
- Order matters: stops are connected in sequence.
- You can hide a stop label from the Animation panel if the map gets crowded.
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