Cartogram

Map wallpapers generated from your photo locations. macOS menu bar app + iOS app.

Reads GPS metadata from your photo library, renders a heatmap overlay on vector map tiles, and sets it as your wallpaper.

Features

• Vector map rendering from OpenFreeMap tiles (no API key needed)
• Five monochromatic themes with matching heatmap accents
• Adjustable zoom (10-16, with overzooming)
• Auto-detect current location or set manually
• macOS: lives in menu bar, sets wallpaper directly
• iOS: full-screen preview with pan, zoom, rotation
• All processing on-device, no data leaves your device

Building

Requires Xcode 15+ and XcodeGen.

brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate
open Cartogram.xcodeproj

Set your development team in Xcode before building.

Architecture

• Sources/MapCore/ - shared library: vector tile renderer, map generation, photo location fetching
• Sources/CLI/ - command-line tool
• macOS/ - macOS menu bar app
• iOS/ - iOS app

The vector tile renderer (VectorTile.swift) is a from-scratch PBF/MVT parser and CGContext renderer with no external dependencies.

Attribution

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Tiles from OpenFreeMap.

License

MIT