Portfolio · Photo intelligence

Travel patterns

Fifteen patterns the algorithm noticed across seventeen years of photographs - habits, anomalies, and absences. None of them planned. All of them visible in the data.

A companion to /the-line/. The numbers were surfaced by an algorithm reading 152,425 timestamps and 2518 geocoded cities. The framing is ours.

I Group of patterns

How we move

The shape of how the trips connect to each other - what we return to, what we collect, what we never bundle, and the small set of airports that make all of it possible.

Iceland: the love affair

5 trips · 105 days · 90 places · 13,341 photos

The only country outside Romania that broke the never-revisit pattern. Five visits clustered into a single 28-month window between July 2020 and November 2022 - more concentrated camera attention than any other repeat destination across the whole library. The 90 places do not form a single circuit; they include three full loops of Route 1, the Westfjords, and the highlands. Iceland is being learned in concentric circles, like a city we might one day live in.

The explorer gene

93% new cities every year

Of the 335 distinct cities we have ever set foot in, only 23 (6.9%) appear on more than one trip. Even in the densest travel years, 85 to 100% of the cities we visit each year are places we have never been. The few repeats - Vienna, the Icelandic south coast, parts of Greece - matter precisely because they are so rare.

The eight pilgrimages

Eight countries, each its own trip

China, Egypt, Faroe Islands, Croatia, Japan, Portugal, Romania, Turkey. Each visited on a dedicated single-country trip, never bundled into a multi-country sweep. The rest of the world we travel in loops; these eight we have defended as single subjects. We travel to them, not through them.

The spine

One home airport · three transfer hubs

44% of every flight leg we have ever taken touches Bucharest's Otopeni. After that, three airports do almost all the connecting work: Frankfurt (13 transfers), Istanbul (10), Munich (9). The map looks vast. The graph that joins it is small.

The sun-chase

−12° in January · +59° in July · a 70° seasonal swing

Average travel latitude by month, weighted by photos. In summer the camera is in Iceland, Norway, the Faroes. In winter it is in Bali, Vietnam, Antarctica. A near-sinusoidal curve, perfectly inverse to the calendar. Across eleven years of independent decisions, the aggregate behaves like a heat-seeking organism. Nobody planned this curve; the data found it.

II Group of patterns

Inside a trip

What happens between the plane landing and the plane leaving - the shape a trip takes once we are inside it, and the moments the camera registers most and least.

The arrival is on day two

Day 1: 46 photos · Day 2: 115

Across the 44 trips of seven days or more in the library, day one averages 46 photographs and day two averages 115. Day-one photos cluster late afternoon (16:00 to 19:00); day-two photos cluster around midday. The trip as a subjective experience does not begin when the plane lands. It begins after the first sleep in a strange room.

The hike is the reward, not the entry

Median first hike: day 4 of any trip

Across 39 hike-bearing trips, only one ever started with a hike on day one. The median first hike falls on day four. The city, the language, the orientation come first. The trail is what we walk into, not what we lead with.

The thinnest trace

174 places hold exactly one photograph

Concentrated in the road-trip countries: Germany (20 one-photo places), Romania (19), Austria (12), Norway (10), Australia (10). A wide spot on a road, a village in inner Anatolia, a Tasmanian pull-off. The shutter went off once and the next photograph is somewhere else. Proof of passage, registered so lightly the place almost falls out of the record.

Christmas on a two-year cadence

Singapore · Antarctica · Hong Kong · Taipei

Christmas Day stays home, every year. New Year's Eve goes on the road every other year: 2019 in Singapore, 2021 at -64° in Antarctica, 2023 in Hong Kong, 2024 in Taipei. The holiday calendar is a quiet two-year metronome.

The work-week shape

43% start Wed/Thu · 35% end Sun

Most trips begin midweek and finish on a Sunday - the Sunday end rate is more than twice the next-highest day. The travel calendar mirrors the standard work-week, with vacation days stacked to extend a long weekend. The pattern held even across years where the trip durations changed dramatically.

III Group of patterns

Home and absence

What the line does when it is not on the road, and the parts of the planet the dataset does not yet contain. The negative space is as legible as the positive.

The year of deeper roots

2,587 home photos in 2024 · the highest year on record

While away-days fell from 197 in 2022 to 83 in 2024, photos taken at home climbed to 2,587 - higher than any peak-travel year, higher than the closed-border pandemic years. The line that retreated on the road moved into the rooms.

Hiking is a travel habit

225 hikes · 210 abroad · 15 at home

Only 15 of 225 tracked hikes are in Romania, even though the Carpathians are an hour's drive from the apartment. The volume is abroad: Iceland 39, New Zealand 22, Spain 19, Italy 18 - five countries hold half the total. The biggest single climb (1,305 m above Brașov) is at home. The count is not.

The eighty-three uncatalogued days

1,241 away-days in the camera · 1,158 in the trip log

The camera knows we were away from home on 1,241 days. The trip register accounts for 1,158 of them. The remaining 83 days are weekend escapes, day trips, drives just outside the home polygon - outings the camera registered but the portfolio never wrote up. The story of where we have been is slightly larger than the story we have told about it.

The map we haven't drawn

Three continents barely touched

After ten years on the road, sub-Saharan Africa is zero countries (Egypt and Morocco are north, Seychelles is offshore). South Asia is zero - no India, no Sri Lanka, no Nepal. Central Asia is zero. The absences map almost exactly onto what is not reachable from a Frankfurt, Istanbul, or Munich connection, or a six-week drive from Bucharest. Where the corridor stops, our trips stop.

Twice to the moon

751,807 km traveled · 1.96× the lunar distance

Cumulative travel distance across eleven years is almost twice the distance from Earth to the moon. The moon sits 384,400 km away; the portfolio is at 751,807. Most of it is air miles, the rest is road - and the line is still getting further out.