Route planning can be easy when it’s near you, but tedious when you’re planning a weekend hike or going for a run when traveling abroad. But if you’re a Strava user, the fitness platform is rolling out a new route planning feature that could help. Starting today at 8:00 AM PT / 11:00 AM ET, you can view recent photos from a route or trail, view highlights and conditions in the mobile app.
The company uses machine learning to exclude photos that contain identifiable faces or gear, and it only includes photos posted publicly on the app. Users who do not want photos of their public activities to be shared as part of the feature should opt out.
You can find route photos for every sport featured in the Routes section of the app, including running, trail running, walking, hikes, rides, mountain bike rides, and gravel rides. According to Strava, the platform has about 2.3 million photos from 200 million user-uploaded public activities over the past year to pull from. It estimates that more than 30,000 photos will be added to the Routes feature every week from Strava users around the world. That said, Strava says it won’t use photos from activities or profiles that have privacy settings enabled.
I need to spend some time with the pre-release feature, and my inner Type-A scheduling nerd used to be stimulated. I was curious to see what the results would be in my neighborhood, as I live in a popular running area near several parks. Immediately I could see about 30-100 photos from known sites. Some were labeled as taken yesterday, while others were labeled “within the past week,” “the past two weeks,” and “the past month.”
The photos I saw were actually quite recent. I found a picture of a local event space with a big Valentine’s Day heart. I ran past it on February 13, Valentine’s Day, and the day after. I can confirm that the heart was there on February 13, 14 and 15. The weather conditions have also been on point in recent days. Another nice perk was seeing what certain areas on the route looked like at night.
That said, I did see a picture of a person sitting on a bench. Their faces were not visible because they had their backs to the camera, but I could see two bicycles. I asked Strava why that photo was included, given that identifiable gear isn’t supposed to be included. Rakesh Shah, Strava’s product manager on the Geo team, shared The edge that the image passed through the machine learning functions because the bikes had no visible logos. Except for me could be see the word “Rynkeby” on one of the two bikes and “Vestegnen” on the handlebars. A google search told me that there is a European charity cycling team called Team Rynkeby and that Vestegnen used to be a suburb of Copenhagen, Denmark. There wasn’t enough to identify the person, but me can it can reasonably be inferred that a current or former Team Rynkeby member was recently cycling in my neighborhood.
Granted, Strava is a form of fitness social media. However, it’s one thing to post a photo to your feed and another to find out that your photos are being crowdsourced for a feature. On that note, Shah says users can opt out by going to Privacy Control and opening the new Public Photos on Routes menu. You can also set your activities or profile to “only followers” or “only me” in the privacy settings. I couldn’t access these settings, but that’s because the feature wasn’t technically live when I tried it out.
I was also curious how well the feature worked other neighborhoods. I put my grandparents’ birthplace in South Korea. Not many routes were available and the selection of photos was much smaller – about three to five per route. It was much clearer that some photos were reused on multiple routes. That wasn’t very surprising, since my family’s hometown is in a province about three hours outside Seoul, Korea’s capital and largest city.
Next, I checked out the routes in Seoul, as well as my old neighborhood in Tokyo, Japan. In Seoul, there was a lot more to look at, although many of the popular tourist spots were. Still, I could imagine how hilly some of these running routes were in a way that elevation maps can’t. Again, options in my old Tokyo neighborhood were more limited, probably because I lived in a residential area where I never saw many runners.
Strava has put more emphasis on route planning over the past year, including bike route difficulty and the ability to share suggested routes with friends. It bought Fatmap, a 3D mapping platform, last month with the intention of eventually bringing more detailed roadmaps to Strava. On the other hand, Strava has also made it clear that many new features require a subscription. Subscribers can see photos while browsing route recommendations. However, free members will only see photos on saved routes and any route a subscriber may have shared with them.
I admit: I enjoyed looking at routes and trails in distant parts of the world, especially places I’ve never been. However, the feature was clearly more useful for popular routes and trails – less so for off-the-beaten-path routes. That’s inevitable when crowdsourcing photos, but it’s something to keep in mind if you’re trying to plan a more remote hike, run, or ride.
