A timelapse replays your logged tracks as a moving boat on a chart, with moorage names and your own notes appearing as captions along the way. It can be one passage or every mile you have ever logged. You can watch it, share it as a link, or export it as a video file.

The four pages

Everything lives in the timelapse menu in the top navigation.

Choose timelapse to watch straight away. Everything else starts from the customiser.

Set one up

Open saillogger.com/timelapse/customize/ and work down the form.

• Choose Trips: a switch. Leave it off and the timelapse covers your whole logbook. Turn it on and two more fields appear, Start Trip and End Trip, each a dropdown of your logged trips by date and name. Set both to replay one passage, or a range for a season.
• Base Map: Satellite Overlay (imagery with place names over it), Satellite (imagery alone) or Street Map.
• Animation Speed: Snail Speed, Very Slow, Slow, Normal (the default), Fast, Very Fast or Light Speed. Slower settings show more detail on a short trip; faster settings make a long passage easier to watch.
• Track Color: Dodger Blue by default, plus Green, Yellow, Red, Orange, Black, Gray and White. Pick something that stands out against the base map you chose: a dark track disappears over deep water.
• Remove Moorage Overlays: a switch. See captions below.
• Zoom Level: 5, 6, then 8 to 13, default 10 (7 is not offered). Low numbers show a whole sea area, high numbers stay close to the boat. If your track runs off the edge, come down a number.
• Initial Delay: None, 5 seconds or 10 seconds, a pause before the boat starts moving. Useful when you are screen-recording it and need a moment to start.

Then press Play.

Choosing settings that suit what you are showing

If playback feels too slow, raise the speed. If the boat moves off the edge of the map, lower the zoom level. Change either setting in the customiser and press Play again.

If it does not look right

• The track runs off the map. Lower the Zoom Level.
• Nothing plays. The chosen range holds no logged trips. Widen it, or switch Choose Trips off to use everything.
• The track is hard to see. Change Track Color, or switch the Base Map to Street Map.
• You want no place names on screen. Turn on Remove Moorage Overlays.

Captions

Two things write captions across a timelapse as the boat passes them:

• Moorage names, added automatically at the start and end of each trip. Switch Remove Moorage Overlays on in the customiser if you would rather have a clean chart.
• Your own notes, wherever you attached one to a position. They add your account of the passage as the boat reaches each point. See Notes, photos and your journal.

Notes stay attached to their recorded positions, so every note in the selected trip range appears as a caption during playback.

Watching

The player has:

• play and pause, bottom left
• a distance legend that counts up as the boat runs, in your own distance units
• a share button
• a red record button, which only you see

Export it as a video

The red record button turns what you are watching into an MP4 file you can post or keep.

1. Set the timelapse up in the customiser first. Changes you make on the map after playback starts, such as zoom or base map, are not captured in the recording.
2. Press the red button and confirm. Saillogger warns you that the conversion can take a while.
3. Saillogger takes it from there. You do not have to keep the page open.
4. Open videos in the timelapse menu, or saillogger.com/timelapse/recordings/. The page refreshes itself, and the status moves from Queued to Processing to Ready for download.
5. Click Ready for download to save the file.

If a selected track is too long for one video, the page asks you to choose a shorter range. Return to the customiser and narrow Start Trip and End Trip; a season may need several video files.

Share a timelapse

The share button hands over the address you are watching, options and all, so the other person sees exactly your version.

Sharing needs Timelapse switched on in your Sharing settings. If it is off, the button tells you the page is not public and offers Go to Sharing settings so you can turn it on. Turning it on publishes your timelapse at your boat's public address; it does not publish anything else.

Export your tracks as GPX

saillogger.com/timelapse/export/ gives you a GPX file for a chosen range of trips. GPX opens in chart plotters and most navigation software, so this is the way to take your tracks somewhere else, or to keep a copy of your own.

It works like the customiser:

• Choose Trips, with Start Trip and End Trip when it is on. Off means everything you have logged.
• Granularity: how many points the file holds. Extremely Granular, Very Granular, Granular, Normal (the default), Coarse, Very Coarse or Extremely Coarse. Coarser means fewer points and a smaller file.
• Export to download it.

Start at Normal. Go finer if you want every wiggle of a harbour approach, and coarser if the file is too big for the device you are loading it onto: some older chart plotters refuse a track with too many points.

The timelapse in the modern app

If your boat is on the modern app, /app/timelapse is a smoother player: it scrubs, it has a satellite toggle, and it can follow the boat as it goes rather than holding one fixed view.

Recording, the customiser and GPX export stay on the classic pages described above, so use both: set up and export on the classic pages, watch wherever you prefer.