Privacy
How Travel Story Maker processes your photos
Travel Story Maker is privacy-first. This article explains exactly what happens to a photo when you add it to a stop: where it is stored, how it is resized, what metadata is kept and what is stripped.
Photos stay in your browser
When you add a photo, it never leaves your device. It is decoded by the browser, resized on the GPU and stored locally. There is no upload to any Travel Story Maker server — even the final video is rendered locally from a canvas.
Automatic resizing
A typical phone photo is 12 MP (~4000×3000 px). That is far more than needed for a 1080p video. Travel Story Maker automatically resizes each photo to a maximum of 1920 px on the longest side, with high-quality bicubic sampling. The result keeps the photo crisp on a 1080p export while keeping memory usage low — useful on mobile devices.
EXIF metadata
When the photo is resized, the EXIF metadata block (camera model, GPS coordinates, original timestamp) is stripped from the in-memory version used in the animation. The original file on your device is untouched.
Local storage
Resized photos are saved in your browser's IndexedDB, scoped to the travelstorymaker.com origin. They are reloaded automatically when you reopen the project. To delete them, remove the photo from the stop, or clear site data from your browser settings.
What appears in the exported video
Only the rendered pixels of the resized photo make it into the final MP4 or WebM, plus the caption you typed. No original file, no metadata, no location data leaks into the exported video.
Ready to try?
Open the editor and build your first animated travel map in minutes.
Open the editor