Reitti, the self-hosted answer to Google Timeline, published v5.6.0 and a release post that rounds up a month of work. The item to act on comes first. In versions before v5.3.2, reitti’s setup flow could be bypassed on an already-configured instance to grant admin rights to any user. The fix landed in v5.3.2, reported responsibly by @kgaut, with tests added so the setup filter does its job from now on. Daniel, the maintainer, is blunt about the stakes: if your instance is reachable from the outside world, update immediately. If you cannot update right now, the stopgap is to block the /setup route at your reverse proxy, and the notes include nginx and Caddy examples.
The timeline keeps getting better
The other half of the story is a month’s worth of UI and pipeline work. Navigating dates changed twice: you can pick a more traditional input-field date picker in Map Settings, or just start typing on the main page and a popup shows what reitti understood, accepting locale formats, ranges like 2025 - 2026, and words like today and yesterday. The scrubber and controls moved into one bar at the top, so nothing jumps around the screen anymore.
Tracks gained a street-level layer: Panoramax photos can now appear along your trips, which pairs nicely with no-visit zones, areas where stops are ignored on purpose. Deleted visits stay deleted, and a smoothed view mode filters the stationary jitter of GPS traces with a Kalman filter on the move, at render time only, so the raw data is untouched. You can also set when your day starts, which matters if your day does not start at midnight.
The pipeline under the hood
v5.6.0’s headline change is for trackers running in battery-saving mode. Phones that only report meaningful moves used to look switched off during the silence in between, so visits were missed or detected far too small. The processing pipeline now recognizes stationary logging from sparse points and fills the gaps, turning scattered dots into understood stays. The maintenance list around it: H3 spatial-cell imports got a 40x speedup, Redis and Valkey connect over unix sockets, pending background jobs survive upgrades, and an Immich integration grows album filters and per-user photo sharing.
My read
The fix has been out for three weeks; the post is the reminder to check where you actually landed. The batch reads like a project finding its shape: the date navigation alone turns the timeline into something you would open on purpose. If you are already on v5.3.2 or later, this is a pleasant update; below it, it is the one to take before the next time the instance is reachable from outside.
Source: the v5.6.0 release notes, plus the security release.