KR MAPS / PRESS — HELP
Move your photos with a cable
Android takes the map location out of every photo it hands to a web page. The phone does that on the way out, and no website can ask for it back — and that location is what draws the routes and maps in your book. The one route that keeps it is a cable: copy the photos onto a computer, then build your book there. About five minutes, and nothing is removed on the way.
On a Windows computer — the whole thing
- Plug the phone into the computer and unlock the phone. Use the cable that came with it — some spare cables only carry power, and the computer won’t see the phone at all.
- On the phone, a notification appears: Charging this device via USB. Tap it, then choose File transfer. Some phones word it “Transferring files” or “MTP”. Until you tap it, the computer sees nothing.
- On the computer, open File Explorer and look under This PC — your phone is listed there by name. Open it, then Internal storage → DCIM → Camera. That’s your camera roll.
- Copy the trip photos into a folder on the computer. Click the first, hold Shift, click the last, then copy and paste them somewhere ordinary — the desktop is fine.
Step 4 is the one people skip. Windows shows a phone as a device, not a drive, so a browser can’t read photos straight off it — the upload box will look empty or stall. Once the photos are sitting in a folder on the computer, everything behaves normally.
On a Mac — one extra hurdle
macOS can’t read an Android phone over USB on its own, and Google retired its Android File Transfer app in 2024. If there’s a Windows computer nearby, the steps above are the short road. Otherwise you can install a free helper — OpenMTP is the one most people use — or take the Google Photos route below, which works in any browser on any computer.
If the photos aren’t on the phone anymore
When Google Photos has backed them up and cleared space, they won’t be in DCIM at all. On a computer, sign in at photos.google.com, gather the trip into an album, and use Download all — you’ll get a ZIP file. Drop the ZIP straight onto the table; your book opens it for you. Photos downloaded from your own library still carry their location.
One exception: a photo someone sent you through a Google Photos shared link arrives without its location — Google removes it there.
Then get them into your book — whichever route you took
Already started a book on your phone? Keep it. In the builder, choose From a different device — it makes a private upload link. Open that link on the computer, pick the photos you just copied, and they land in the book you already started, this time with their locations.
Or just begin on the computer. Open the book builder there and drop the folder onto the table. Nothing is lost by starting fresh — the book builds itself from the photos.
Or send them from the Journeys app — no computer, but in open testing
Our phone app is allowed to read a photo’s location where a web page isn’t, and it sends the photos straight to a book here — cable and computer skipped entirely.
Worth knowing first: it’s still in open testing. It isn’t finished, and it isn’t in the Play Store proper yet — you join the test to install it, and you should expect rough edges the website doesn’t have. If that’s fine by you, it’s the one route that keeps your maps without a computer.
What doesn’t work, however it’s dressed up: sharing photos into a browser, emailing them to yourself, WhatsApp, Bluetooth, Quick Share. The location is gone on all of them. It isn’t about which app you send from — Android removes it whenever a photo leaves for something that isn’t allowed to see it, and a web page never is.
Either way, you still get a book. Photos with no location still know when they were taken, so the days and chapters build themselves — only the maps go quiet. And you can always point photos out on the map by hand, a few at a time; one answer usually settles a whole afternoon.