Your iPhone saves where most of your photos were taken, so your photo library is already a record of the countries you've been to. Open the Photos app, switch your library to its map, zoom out to the whole world and go continent by continent, writing down every country with a pin. Then settle the edge cases (airports, cruises, photos from a plane) before you count.
It takes about an hour for a big library, and it usually turns up a country or two you'd forgotten.
Step 1: Make sure your photos have locations
A photo only has a place if the Camera was allowed to use your location when you took it. Check Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Camera. If it says Never, your photos from that time have no location. Our guide to making your iPhone save where each photo was taken walks through the setting.
Photos from a camera without GPS, scans of old prints and pictures saved from chats usually have no location either. They won't appear on the map, so trips from those years need other evidence. Why some of your iPhone photos have no location covers every cause.
Step 2: Open the map of your whole library
Apple moves this between iOS versions, so look for the one that matches your phone:
- iOS 26 and later: in Photos, tap Library, tap the Sort and Filter button, then tap Show Map.
- iOS 18: in Pinned Collections, tap Map.
- Older versions: look for the Places album.
Only photos and videos with a saved location appear. Pinch to zoom, drag to move around, and tap a cluster of thumbnails to see every photo taken there. More detail is in how to see your photos on a map on iPhone.
Step 3: Go continent by continent
Working through the whole globe at once is how countries get missed. Instead:
- Zoom out until you can see one continent, say Europe.
- Write down every country that has at least one cluster of photos.
- Pinch in on big clusters. A pile of photos labeled "Rome" can hide a separate country inside it.
- Move on to the next continent, and don't forget islands far from the mainland.
Small countries are the ones that vanish inside a neighbor's cluster. Vatican City sits inside Rome, Monaco is a short ride from Nice, and San Marino and Liechtenstein are easy day trips that get folded into Italy or Switzerland. The list of the smallest countries is a good thing to check your map against.
Two Photos features jog your memory as you go. Collections > Trips groups photos into trips by location, and you can tap a year to reach older trips. The search tab finds places too: Apple's examples are a city or a state, so try "Kyoto" or "Lisbon" and see what comes up.
Keep the list somewhere simple: a note, a spreadsheet, or our country checklist, where you tick countries off as you find them.
Step 4: Decide the edge cases
The map shows where your phone was, not whether you "visited." Before you add a country, decide what you count:
- Photos only at an airport. A layover in Doha or Frankfurt puts a pin in Qatar or Germany. Whether that counts is a real debate; see does a layover count as visiting a country?
- Photos from a plane window. GPS records where the plane was, so a shot of the clouds can drop a pin over Greenland or Iran. Almost nobody counts a country they only flew over. Look at the photo itself: if it's sky and wing, leave it out.
- Photos at sea. On a cruise, a photo taken offshore can land in open water or near a coast you never set foot on. A port where you went ashore is a different matter; see does a cruise stop count?
- Photos right at a border. Phone location can be off by a little, so a photo at Niagara Falls might land on the Canadian or the American side. Count the side you stood on.
- Screenshots and saved images. A screenshot of a map or a picture a friend sent tells you nothing about where you were. Leave them out.
- Territories. A pin in Greenland or Puerto Rico counts as a separate place on some lists and not on others. Pick your list first: 193, 195, 250 or 330.
Step 5: Fill the gaps from other records
Your photos will miss trips: years before you had a smartphone, a lost phone, a stretch with location switched off. Fill those in from other sources. Old passports, email booking confirmations and a Google Maps Timeline export all help. Our guide on how to remember every place you've traveled goes through each one, and turning passport stamps into a travel map handles the stamps.
Doing it automatically
If you'd rather not zoom across the map by hand, Globestamp does this from your photos, privately on the iPhone: it reads where each photo was taken and finds the countries you've been to, including old trips, and nothing is uploaded. It skips photos taken from a plane and screenshots, gives an airport-only country a lighter transit stamp, and keeps the places it isn't sure of on a "To check" card until you decide.
Either way, once you have your list, you can color a world map of the countries you've visited or work out how much of the world you've seen.