The old answer was a .geojson file. Perfect for you — it's the real data, lossless, standard. Useless for your mom. She opens it and sees a wall of coordinates.

I could have made a "pretty" export that throws the data away, and a "real" export that throws the pretty away, and made you choose. Instead I asked a better question: what if it didn't have to be a choice?

One file, two layers

When you share a note in the next version, you get a PDF. Just a PDF — the most universal document there is. Your mom opens it on any phone, any computer, and sees a clean field report: a map with your route or your pins drawn on it, your photos, your words, the date and place. She reads it like a page. She doesn't need to know what GeoJSON is, or that your app exists.

But tucked inside that same PDF is the whole note — the original .geojson, byte-for-byte, plus every original photo, video, and voice memo, embedded as real file attachments. When someone with GeoJSONic opens that PDF, the app pulls the note back out, perfectly, and drops it into their journal. Nothing lost. Same coordinates, same media, same everything.

The document your mom reads and the data your app imports are the same file. You never choose between beautiful and lossless — you get both.

This isn't a hack. Embedding files inside a PDF is part of the standard (it's how archival PDF/A-3 works). I spent a full day proving the round-trip before I wrote a line of the feature: share a note, extract the embedded data with a completely separate tool, and confirm it came out identical to the original down to the last byte. It did.

It scales to your whole journal

Because the data streams into the file instead of loading all at once, this works for a single note and for a full backup that's gigabytes of video. Your entire journal becomes one self-describing PDF: a cover page with the stats, and every note and clip embedded inside, ready to restore. One file that is your life on a map — readable by anyone, owned by you.

Free to share, honest about the map

There are two flavors, and the difference is about keeping the free tier free. A free share draws its map with Apple's own MapKit — so sharing never costs me anything and never will. The richer report, with the full 3D-style basemap, rides along with Pro. Same PDF idea either way; the free one just uses a free map.

That's the through-line for everything I build: your stuff should be yours, portable, and readable without asking permission — including when you hand it to someone else. A PDF turned out to be the most honest way to do that. It's coming soon.

Download GeoJSONic on the App Store →

So when I built a place to keep the places in my life, I built it the opposite way.

GeoJSONic has no backend

There's no account. No sign-up. No server that receives your notes, because there is no server. When you write a note, it's saved on your phone, as a file, in the app's own storage. I never see it. I couldn't see it if I wanted to — there's nowhere for it to go.

This isn't a privacy setting you toggle. It's the architecture. The free app never even makes a network connection for your data. A few features ask a service a narrow question — a coordinate goes to Apple to turn into a place name or a weather reading — and the answer comes back and gets stored in your file. That's it. No profile, no ad SDK, no tracking you across apps you've never heard of.

Why give up the easy money?

Because the easy money is the trap. The reason so many apps are "free" is that you're the product — your locations, your habits, your attention, packaged and sold. A map of everywhere you've been is about the most valuable thing you could hand a company, and most map apps are built to collect exactly that.

I didn't want to be in that business. I wanted to make something I'd trust with my own family's whereabouts. You can't do that and also be quietly monetizing the data. So I don't. GeoJSONic makes money the old-fashioned way: the journal and the online globe are free; some people pay a few dollars a month for offline maps and the field tools that ride with them. That pays for the map tiles. The end.

A map of your life is too important to keep on someone else's computer.

What you get for it

Permanence. Your journal outlives the app, the company, and me. It's a standard file you can read, back up, and open in other tools forever. If I get hit by a bus, your notes are fine.

And a kind of quiet you can't fake. No feed refreshing for your attention. No "someone viewed your location." No algorithm deciding which of your memories to show you. Just your notebook, on your phone, where you left it.

That's not a limitation I'm apologizing for. It's the reason the thing exists.

Download GeoJSONic on the App Store →

GeoJSONic is the other thing. It's a field journal for the places in your life, and it works like a notebook does: you write in it, it's yours, and nobody else is in the room.

A note is a place, and everything around it

Open the app, tap +, and you've pinned where you are. Write what happened. Add a photo, a video, a voice memo. The app quietly records the context of the moment along with it — the coordinate, the elevation, your heading and speed, the local time, the place name, even a snapshot of the weather. Not so it can profile you. So that years from now the note still means something: where you stood, and what the world was doing when you stood there.

You don't need a signal for any of it. That's the whole point. The best places are usually the ones with no bars — the trailhead, the back forty, the middle of the drive. GeoJSONic captures there and asks nothing of the network.

The file is the feature

Here's the part that matters most, and it's the part no other app will tell you: your journal is a plain file, and you can hold it.

Every note is a GeoJSON Feature — an open standard (RFC 7946), the same format working cartographers and open-data projects use. Your words and the sensor reading of the moment live side by side in the file, in plain text you could read with your own eyes. Back up your entire journal as a single .geojson and open it anywhere. There's no export that loses something, because there's nothing to export from — the file on disk already is the journal.

That means no lock-in. If GeoJSONic vanished tomorrow, your notes wouldn't. They'd still be sitting there, readable, yours.

See it on the globe

The free app is complete — capture, keep, share, and see your life on a 3D globe. Every note as a pin, your routes and scouted areas drawn in place; spin the earth and watch your years accumulate. No paywall between you and the map.

GeoJSONic Pro is for the parts that cost real money to run in the field: download whole map areas so the globe works with no signal, satellite imagery for ground truth, and the measurement workflow when you're scouting a boundary or writing a field report. The split is honest — free is the journal and the online map; Pro is the maps that work when the bars disappear.

Who it's for

People who go places and want to remember them truthfully — the property owner walking a fence line, the hunter marking a stand, the family on a long drive, anyone who'd rather keep a real journal than feed a feed.

It's the offline location journal you own. Not a service you rent. A notebook you keep.

Download GeoJSONic on the App Store →