Route planning can be easy if it’s in your neighborhood, but a pain when you’re planning a weekend hike or a run when traveling abroad. But if you’re a Strava user, the fitness platform is rolling out a new route planning feature that might help. Starting at 8 a.m. PT / 11 a.m.
The company is using machine learning to exclude photos that include identifiable faces or equipment, and only include photos posted publicly on the app. Users who do not want photos of their public activities shared as part of the feature will have to opt out.
You can find route photos for any sport featured in the Routes section of the app, including runs, trail runs, hikes, hikes, rides, mountain bike rides, and gravel rides. According to Strava, the platform has approximately 2.3 million photos from 200 million public activities uploaded by users in the last year to extract. It is estimated that over 30,000 weekly photos will be added to the Routes feature from Strava users around the world. That said, Strava says it won’t use any photos from activities or profiles that have privacy settings enabled.
I had to spend some time with the feature before launch, and my inner Type-A planner nerd was Chopped I was curious to see what the results would be in my neighborhood, since I live in a popular running area near several parks. Right away, I was able to see roughly 30-100 photos of familiar sites. Some were labeled as taken yesterday, while others were labeled “within the last week,” “within the last two weeks,” and “within the last month.”
The photos I saw were, in fact, quite recent. I found a picture of a local event space with a big Valentine’s Day heart. In fact, I ran through February 13, Valentine’s Day, and the day after. I can confirm that the heart was there on February 13, 14 and 15. Weather conditions have also been favorable in recent days. Another big bonus was seeing what certain areas of the route looked like at night.
With that being said, I saw a photo of a person sitting on a bench. Her face was not visible as they had their backs to the camera, but I could see two bicycles. I asked Strava why that image was included, since identifiable equipment is not supposed to be included. Rakesh Shah, Strava product manager on the Geo team, said the edge that the image went through machine learning functions because the bikes had no visible logos. Except me could see the word “Rynkeby” on one of the two bikes and “Vestegnen” on the wheel. A Google search told me that there is a European charity cycling team called Team Rynkeby and that Vestegnen was a suburb of Copenhagen, Denmark. There wasn’t enough to identify the person, but I can reasonably infer that a current or former member of the Rynkeby team was recently riding a bike in my neighborhood.
Ok Strava is a form of fitness social networking. However, it’s one thing to post a photo to your feed and another to find out that your photos are being collaborated for a feature. On that front, Shah says users can opt out by heading to Privacy Controls and accessing the new Public Photos on Trails menu. Alternatively, you can set your activities or profile to “followers only” or “me only” in privacy settings. I couldn’t access this setting, but that’s because the feature wasn’t technically active when I tried it.
I was also curious to see how well the feature worked on other neighborhoods I put in the hometown of my grandparents in South Korea. There weren’t many routes available and the selection of photos was much smaller, about three to five per route. It was much more obvious that some of the photos were reused across various routes. That wasn’t terribly surprising, since my family’s hometown is in a province about three hours from Seoul, Korea’s capital and largest city.
Next, I checked the routes in Seoul, as well as my old neighborhood in Tokyo, Japan. In Seoul, there was much more to see, although many were popular tourist spots. Still, I could visualize how mountainous some of these running routes were in a way that elevation charts can’t. Options in my old Tokyo neighborhood were, again, more limited, probably because I lived in a more residential neighborhood where I never saw many joggers.
Strava has placed more emphasis on route planning in the last year, including route difficulty for cycling and the ability to share suggested routes with friends. It acquired Fatmap, a 3D mapping platform, last month with the intention of eventually bringing more detailed route maps to Strava. On the other hand, Strava has also made it clear that many new features will require a subscription. Subscribers will be able to view photos while searching for route recommendations. However, free members will only see photos on saved trails and any trails a subscriber has shared with them.
I’ll admit it: I had fun looking at routes and trails in remote parts of the world, particularly places I’d never been. However, the feature was obviously more useful for popular routes and trails, less for off-the-beaten paths. That’s unavoidable when you’re sharing photos, but something to keep in mind if you’re trying to plan a more remote hike, run, or ride.
