Travel History

Some government forms like the US N-400, and Global Entry application require you to report your travel history. This can be hard to piece together from e-ticket records and the likes.

Using GPS Log to keep a travel history

If you use the app GPS log every time you enter and exit the country, you can keep a convenient history of your travels for easy reporting on government forms.

Here’s how to do it. Every time you’re at an airport, or a land border simply create a spike in the app. A spike is like a journal entry that records the date, time and location, optionally with some notes. For easy organization, add the name like the airport code, for example “SFO”, and give it a tag like #airport. The tag is optional but if you’re using the app a lot for other things, it will help you to search for it later.

Do this for every airport you visit, and you’ll know when and where you travelled. For example, your list might show “SFO, CDG, CDG, SFO” for a round trip from San Francisco to Paris. You’ll know exactly when you left, when you returned and where you were along the way.

And if you forget to do it in the moment, that’s OK! When you remember, create a new spike and pick a photo from the day of travel. GPS Log will automatically use that location and date, and you can still add the same info as above.

Do this every time you travel, and you’ll have a convenient travel history in your pocket, ready when needed!

Plus, you might find the app useful for logging cool places you find on your adventures, so you can share with friends and find your way back.

Recreating your travel log

What if you have not been using the app, and need to create a 5 year travel history from scratch?

This is also possible to achieve, provided you have photos from your travel and can roughly remember where or when you visited key locations.

One way is to open the Apple Photos app, and navigate to “People and Places” this shows you the places you’ve visited, to help you remember where you’ve been Look at the details of the photo to see the date. This could be enough, you can browse through your places and write down your history (note: be sure to check if you visited the same place multiple times!).

Instead of writing this down, GPS Log can help organize your travel records in a convenient list that you can add to, and refer back to at any time.

The steps involved are the following:

1. Create a new spike in the app
2. Tap “Add photo”
3. Use the Search bar provided by iOS to find a photo from your trip. for example, to add a trip you took to Paris, search “Paris”. Or, if the trip was in March, search “March 2023”. Use the “People and Places” trick described above to help you remember these details.
4. Pick a photo near the top for the last photo from the trip, or scroll to the bottom to pick the first photo from the trip. Make sure you’re picking photos from the first/last day of the trip to get the correct dates.
5. If needed (for exmaple, the photo you picked was on day 2 of the trip) you can adjust the date of these records.