A scratch map app is the digital version of the scratch-off poster: you tap each country you've been to and it fills in. A photo-based travel map, like Globestamp, reads where your photos were taken and fills the map in for you. Tapping is quick, covers trips from before smartphones and leaves you in full control; photos catch places you'd forgotten and count your days there, but they only know the trips where your camera saved a location. Most people's real history needs a little of both.
How a scratch map app works
You open a world map, tap a country, and choose a status. Two current examples, from their own App Store listings on 13 November 2026:
- ScratchMap: Travel Tracker lets you tap any of 232 countries and territories and mark it Want to visit, Visited or Lived here, with progress by continent and traveler ranks from Explorer to Legend. Its listing says there's no account to create and no ads, and that your map is stored on your device.
- Scratch Map: Countries Visited offers visited, want to visit and lived, progress by country, continent and world coverage, and "Together", a combined map with someone you invite by a link. Its listing says there's no Scratch Map account, with optional iCloud sync through your Apple ID, and its newest release adds a passport with a stamp for every country.
Bigger apps, such as Skratch, wrap the same scratch-style map in more tools, from guides to eSIMs.
The appeal is obvious. It takes a few minutes, it works for the backpacking trip you took in 2004, and nothing is counted that you didn't choose. The weak spot is memory: after enough trips, the details blur, and a day trip or a border crossing slips through.
How a photo-based map works
A photo-based map starts from the location saved with each photo. Globestamp reads it privately on the iPhone, never uploads the photos, and sorts the countries it finds: Lived (a home was there), Stayed (photos on two days or more) or Visited (photos on one day). Because a photo isn't always proof of standing somewhere, it applies rules:
- A photo taken from a plane never counts.
- A photo more than 25 km from any coast is at sea, and never counts. A port you went ashore in does.
- Photos only at an airport make a transit stamp in lighter ink, counted only if you count layovers.
- Screenshots and screen recordings never count.
Anything it isn't sure of waits on a "To check" card. And you can add, take off or change any stamp by hand, so it works as a scratch map too: hold any country to mark it.
Globestamp isn't alone in reading photo locations; other apps on the App Store describe the same idea.
Side by side
| ScratchMap: Travel Tracker | Scratch Map: Countries Visited | Globestamp | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tap a country to mark it | Yes | Yes | Yes, hold any country |
| Statuses | Want to visit, Visited, Lived here | Visited, want to visit, lived | Been there, Want to go, Lived there |
| Finds countries from photo locations | Not stated | Not stated | Yes, on the iPhone |
| Time in each country | Not stated | Travel timeline (Pro) | Days in every country |
| Account | No | No | No |
| Where the map is kept | On your device | On your devices, optional iCloud sync | In your iCloud, with a backup |
| Share | A picture of your map | Share cards and a combined map by link | Share cards, and compare with a friend by a link |
| Export to a file | Not stated | Not stated | CSV, PDF, KML, GeoJSON |
Where the two approaches disagree
Run the same life through both and you'll find a few gaps:
- The forgotten day. You tapped Spain and France but forgot the afternoon in Andorra. If you took a photo there, a photo-based map finds it.
- The trip before smartphones. That interrail summer in 1998 left prints, not location data. Only tapping gets it on the map. How to remember every place you've traveled, years later has ways to rebuild it.
- The plane window. A scratch map counts what you decide. A photo-based map has to rule out the shot of the Alps from 10,000 m, which is why Globestamp's plane rule exists.
- Photos without location. Some cameras, some apps and some settings save no location. Why some of your iPhone photos have no location explains the usual causes.
Which to choose
- Choose tapping if your travels are few and clear in your mind, if most of them predate your phone, or if you'd rather no app looked at your photos at all.
- Choose photos if you've traveled a lot over many years, want days in each country as well as a count, or suspect you've forgotten a few.
- Combine them if you want the most complete list: let the photos do the first pass, then tap in what they can't know. How to find every country you've been to from your iPhone photos walks through the first pass by hand, without any app.
If what you really want is the physical poster on the wall, scratch-off map or travel app? weighs the paper version, and our free visited countries map lets you color one in online and save the picture.
ScratchMap, Scratch Map and Skratch are trademarks of their owners; Globestamp is not affiliated with any of them.