PastPort

PastPort combines the best of your photos and your itinerary. You’re in control. Revisit past journeys, now visualized on the map, and paired elegantly with the pictures you took along the way!

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What it Is

In a world obsessed with the future, PastPort helps you celebrate your past. We developed a personalized archiving app that stores 3 months of geolocation data and allows you to retroactively log a journey.

When you choose, PastPort publishes a gallery of your photos mapped to the exact routes you traveled, all visible on a highly interactive globe!

Your journeys remain completely private unless you choose to share a link with another PastPort user. This creates a trusted network where friends and family can exchange real, personal travel experiences — helping each other discover hidden gems and avoid disappointments.

Inspiration

As international students from China, Brazil, Vietnam, and Haiti, we know firsthand how meaningful travel can be, whether it's a daily campus commute, a summer internship in a new city, or a once-in-a-lifetime graduation trip. The problem? Memories fade, and cataloging every detail takes away from the present moment. PastPort handles that work for you.

Over time, PastPort becomes more than a photo album. It becomes a window into your evolving preferences — the hotels you keep returning to, the restaurants you'll never revisit, the moments that shaped you.

People have used pin-marked maps for years. PastPort modernizes that tradition with automatic indexing, intuitive design, and real-world practicality for today's global traveler. Because your journey deserves to be remembered — to know where you’re going, you have to know where you’ve been.

How we built it

We built this with the help of Claude by Anthropic. Our backend is Python with FastAPI. The backend manages all the coordinate and image data. This is then fed to our simple HTML, CSS, and JavaSciprt frontend. What's tying all of this together is Mapbox, the API that makes the globe and the path drawing possible.

Challenges we ran into

The first technical challenge was how to implement a highly interactive and performant globe. We wanted it to be as elegant and seamless as Apple Maps. Fortunately, Mapbox provided all the necessary tools to achieve this vision.

Secondly, it was everyone's first time directly managing image metadata. We faced countless bugs on maintaining consistency between our two main data sources, GPS coordinates and photos. Ultimately, the coordinates are trimmed to the minimum necessary to draw your journey's path, Mapbox snaps messy GPS information generated by our phones to real streets, and then images are mapped to the coordinate closest to its metadata.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are beyond proud of pushing our technical, mental, and physical limits. The coordination and team dynamic, despite having met just today, exceeded all our expectations. We worked like a well oiled machine!

In the end, we created something that is practical for our demographic, visually appealing, technically complex, and legible for all.

What we learned

All participants went above and beyond their comfort zones to execute the implementation of this project. Rafael learned how to use the Mapbox API, which generates the globe on the browser. Neiman experienced what's like to work in a fast-paced technical project and creating wireframes. Kevin flexed his Python skills implementing the code that manages all the coordinate data collected. And, Teddy used her coding skills to manage all the pictures.

What's next for PastPort

PastPort has a bright future ahead. Although the project is currently a web app, this is just a mock for what will eventually be a full-fledged mobile app. Throughout the current MVP, you will see many buttons and features that are coming soon! Some of these features include:

  • Sharing your journeys as links to other users
  • Personalizing the color scheme
  • Milestones, which would be aggregated statistics of your journeys, like distance traveled, continents visited, etc.
  • Include a "Spotify Wrapped"-style recap at the end of the year
  • Include option to print and receive in the mail a physical "yearbook" style album for your journeys. This is similar to Google Photos
  • Similar to how "stories" and "short-form" videos have dominated social media platforms, we envision PastPort's style of aggregating photos becomes a standard feature that large platforms compete against each other on.

As a product with a lot of demand, PastPort can be monetized by:

  • Analyzing user travel preferences, and recommending them matching hotels, restaurants, and points of interest.
  • Embed booking directly in PastPort, as many people will spend countless hours recollecting their old trips, and may suddenly feel inspired to travel again!
  • Users can be notified of major events that our app decides they like. Sports fans will be notified of games nearby. Foodies can be recommended trendy restaurants.
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