How It Went

How It Went is an app that turns one ride or a whole trip into a short film, built from the GPS track, photos and clips a rider already has. The route draws itself across a tilted map, each photo appears at the point on the track where it was taken, and clips play where they were shot. Rides can be picked straight from a Strava account or brought in as Garmin FIT files — including the zip produced by Export File in Garmin Connect — or as GPX. The output is an ordinary MP4 video, delivered in 9:16 for Instagram and TikTok or 16:9 for YouTube, assembled on an iPhone, an Android phone or a Mac. It is made for people who come home from a long Saturday or a week away with a track nobody is ever going to scroll through, and who want that day or that trip told as a film rather than a slideshow. A handful of photos, a couple of clips and a GPS track is what most trips actually produce — and the track is the part nobody is ever going to scroll through. A slideshow fails on exactly the day you most want to keep: the long solitary one where you were too tired to take pictures. There may be one photograph from six hours in the saddle, or none at all, and nothing to hold the day together. The track, by contrast, is the only thing recorded densely enough to carry a day on its own. How It Went is built on that observation: here the route is the film, and the photographs punctuate it. Instead of stringing stills together and hoping they add up to a story, the film is anchored to the movement itself, so a day with almost no pictures still has something to show for it. The app accepts rides in several ways. Strava users can pick rides straight from their account, so a ride already recorded on a head unit or phone arrives without extra handling. Riders who keep their own files can bring Garmin FIT files, including the zip file you get from Export File in Garmin Connect, and GPX files. A whole trip can be dropped in at once rather than loading one activity at a time, and a single ride can be sent over from another app's share sheet. Films can cover one ride or an entire trip. Several activities merge into a single film, day by day, with rest days kept as rest days rather than dropped from the running order, so the shape of a week away stays intact. Each day opens with its figures — a day card over a faded map, as in the app's own example of Day 2 of 5, 152.9 km, 1,283 m and 5 h 06 — and a quiet card marks a rest day. The route is drawn across a tilted map, and the longest climb stands up off the map as a wall with its height captioned. The hardest effort of the week is marked with a highlight on the route. A single ride works as a film on its own: it opens on the date and the distance, with no day count to sit through. Photos find their place automatically, placed along the track by the time they were taken rather than by hand-dragging them onto a timeline. When one lands wrong, the film can be played to the point where the photo was taken and the photo placed there, and the rest of that camera's photos can follow. The same logic covers a common failure: an action cam never set to local time will drop a lunch stop in the wrong valley, and there is no way to tell by looking at the photograph. Fixing the clock once moves everything shot on that camera together, so a whole card of footage is corrected in one step. The times in the film are the times you rode at — edit after you have flown home, and a photo taken at 1:30 still says 1:30. A four-minute action-cam file usually holds two or three moments worth keeping, not one. How It Went lets each of those moments be pulled out on its own, so the clips that land in the film are the ones that matter rather than the whole recording. Clips sit where they were shot, framed by the map above and below, which keeps the footage tied to the place it came from instead of floating free of the route. Combined with photo placement, this means every piece of media in the film is anchored to a specific point on the track. How It Went is explicitly not a training app. There are no leaderboards, no segments, no percentiles and nothing that ranks you against anybody else. The figures in the film say what kind of day it was rather than how you compared to other riders. That choice shapes the whole product: the numbers that appear — distance, elevation, moving time, a hardest effort — are there to describe the day, not to grade it. The film is a record of where you went and what you saw, and the map is the spine that everything else hangs from. Out comes an ordinary video file: 9:16 for Instagram and TikTok, or 16:9 for YouTube. The film is assembled on the phone, so it can be posted the evening you get in. The Mac version is a real Mac app rather than the phone app in a window: a ride can be opened from Finder, and a trip can be sent from the phone to the Mac and back. A single long Saturday becomes a film on its own, opening on its date and distance. A week away becomes a day-by-day film with rest days left in. A rider who shot almost nothing on the hardest day still gets a film out of the track. Someone who comes home with a mis-set action cam fixes the clock once and the photos and clips fall into place. Anyone who wants to post the same evening exports a 9:16 file straight from the phone, and anyone who prefers a bigger screen moves the trip to the Mac. Strava users, riders who record on Garmin devices and export FIT files, and anyone carrying GPX files from another app are the natural audience, along with travellers who bring back photos, action-cam clips and a track from a multi-day trip. The app runs on iPhone, Android and Mac, and is available from the App Store, the Mac App Store and Google Play. It is free to use, with an optional Premium tier. How It Went's proposition is narrow and clear: the route is the film. By building the video around the GPS track and letting photographs and clips punctuate it, the app produces something worth keeping from days that a slideshow would have lost — and it does so on the phone in your pocket, ready to post.