How to make a travel video from a Google Maps route

Start from the route, not from the footage

Most travel edits start the same way: every clip and photo gets dumped onto a timeline, and then the editing becomes an argument with yourself about what to cut. It is slow, and it usually produces a video that is technically fine and completely forgettable.

A route gives you something a pile of media does not — structure that already exists. It is an ordered list of real places with real distances between them. That ordering is simultaneously chronological and geographic, which means it does two narrative jobs at once: it tells the viewer what happened next, and it tells them how far away next was.

So the first decision is not which photos to use. It is which stops make the film.

Getting your route out of Google Maps

Google Maps does not offer a direct "export this route" button on the directions panel, which is the single most common thing people get stuck on. There are three practical ways around it, and which one you use depends on whether you are working from a trip you planned or a trip you actually took.

My Maps is the cleanest option. Go to google.com/mymaps, create a map, drop a pin at each stop in order, then use the layer menu to export to KML or KMZ. You get a real file with named, ordered points.

Google Takeout works for trips you have already taken with Location History enabled. Request a Location History export and you will get your actual recorded movement, which is far more detailed than you need — you will be thinning it down to a handful of stops anyway.

Just retyping the stop names is genuinely fine and often fastest. A travel video needs eight to twelve places, not a GPS trace with four thousand points. If you can list your stops from memory, you have already done the export.

Decide the stop list before you touch anything else

A useful rule of thumb: each stop needs roughly five to eight seconds of screen time to register with a viewer. Below five seconds it reads as a flash and the name does not land. Above ten it starts to drag unless something is genuinely happening on screen.

That arithmetic sets your stop count. A 60-second film supports eight to ten stops. A 90-second film supports twelve to fifteen. If your trip had thirty stops, you are not making a thirty-stop video — you are choosing which ten represent it.

Cutting stops is the highest-leverage edit available to you, and it is the one most people skip. A ten-stop film where every place gets room to breathe beats a thirty-stop film that feels like a checklist, every time.

Let the map move be the transition

This is the part that makes a route-based video feel different from a slideshow. When the camera travels across the map from one stop to the next, that movement is your transition. You do not need a crossfade, a whip pan, or a light leak on top of it. Adding one is redundant and usually looks worse.

It also means distance becomes legible. A 400-kilometre leg should take visibly longer to cross than a walk between two neighbourhoods. When you preserve that relationship, viewers feel the shape of the trip without you narrating it — the long empty stretch across a desert reads as a long empty stretch.

The failure mode to avoid is a constant-speed camera that treats every leg identically. It flattens exactly the information the map was supposed to convey.

Attach photos to places, not to timestamps

Phone photo libraries are sorted by time, which seems like the obvious ordering until you try to cut with it. Real trips are messy: you shoot forty frames at one viewpoint, nothing for three hours, then a burst at dinner. Chronological order faithfully reproduces that lumpiness.

Grouping by place fixes it. Each stop gets its own small set of images, and each set gets roughly equal screen time regardless of how trigger-happy you were at any particular location. The viewer experiences an even rhythm; you keep the trip's actual sequence.

Three to five photos per stop is the working range. One photo per stop feels thin. Eight starts to feel like an album.

Match the pacing to the kind of trip

A road trip wants longer map moves and fewer, larger photo groupings — the driving is part of the story, so let the map linger. A city break wants the opposite: short hops, tight zoom, more images per stop, because the density of places is the story.

A hike or a multi-day trek sits in between, and benefits from elevation being visible in the map style if your tool supports it. The climb is the narrative.

Export for where it will actually be watched

Aspect ratio matters more than resolution for travel video. 16:9 for YouTube and anything watched on a laptop. 9:16 for Reels, Shorts, and TikTok. 1:1 still works well in feeds where it fills more vertical space than 16:9.

If the film is going to more than one platform, compose for the tightest crop first. A 9:16 export cropped down from a 16:9 edit throws away the sides of every photo, and travel photography tends to put the good part at the edges.

Doing this with TripsMovie

TripsMovie is built around this exact workflow: you add stops in order, attach photos to the place they belong to, and the route drives the map animation and the film's pacing automatically. You can preview the whole thing in the browser before committing to an export.

Standard exports are free with a TripsMovie watermark. HD watermark-free exports use credits. Open the app if you want to try it against a route you already have.