Travel Story MakerTravel Story Maker

Stops

How to add destinations to your travel route

Updated on June 26, 20263 min read

Destinations — also called stops — are the backbone of your animated travel map. This guide covers the three ways to add them, how to reorder and rename them, and a few tips to keep your route clean and readable.

Search by name

The fastest way is the search bar at the top of the sidebar. Type a city, region, country or famous landmark and pick a result. Travel Story Maker uses OpenStreetMap for geocoding so almost any named place on Earth works.

Press Enter to add the place as a stop. In the example below we start the trip with Paris.

Searching for Paris and picking it from the geocoding results
Type a city and pick a result to add it as a stop.
Searching for Barcelona to add it as the second stop
Repeat for each destination — here Barcelona becomes the second stop.

Click on the map

For a custom stop with no specific name — a viewpoint, a beach, the middle of a road trip — simply click on the map. A new stop appears at that exact coordinate. You can then rename it from the sidebar.

Paste coordinates

If you already have a latitude and longitude (from a GPS, a Google Maps share link or a flight tracker), paste them into the search bar in the format `lat, lng`. The stop is added at that exact point.

Reorder and rename

Drag the handle on the left of a stop to change its position in the route; the trash icon removes it. Double-click the title to rename it — useful when the auto-detected name is too long or in a language you do not want on the final video.

The stops list showing Paris, Barcelona and Milan with their legs
Each stop shows its flag and the leg below it; drag the handle to reorder.

Best practices

Keep your route readable by spacing stops out. A 30-second animation typically shows 4 to 8 stops well — beyond that, viewers lose track.

  • Group nearby points into a single stop when possible.
  • Order matters: stops are connected in sequence.
  • You can hide a stop label from the Animation panel if the map gets crowded.
Paris to Barcelona to Milan route shown on the map
Three well-spaced stops make a clean, readable route.

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