Your walks, as files you can take anywhere

A walk on WalkSpy has always been a thing you could watch and share by link. Now it is also a thing you can download.

Open any recorded walk and look for the new Files button in the chrome bar. Tap it and a sheet opens with six formats:

Route on the map. A PNG that draws your route on top of the actual basemap. This is the one you want for Instagram, Discord, or any chat where you would post a screenshot. It includes the title, the walker name, and proper map attribution baked into the corner so it stands on its own without needing context.

Route on paper. The same polyline on a clean warm-paper background, no basemap. Useful for prints, minimalist share cards, or a contrasting variant when the basemap would be visually noisy.

Route as vector. An SVG version of the on-paper render. Scales to any size without quality loss, good for posters or embedding in other documents.

GPX track. The standard format that imports cleanly into Strava, Garmin Connect, Komoot, and most other sports apps. We include per-point timestamps, so apps that compute pace from the GPX can do that too.

GeoJSON. For developers and anyone using a mapping library directly. We use the snapped LineString when we have one (cleaner) and fall back to the raw GPS trace.

Walk video. A direct download of the recorded MP4, with a clean filename like WalkSpy-walker-slug-walk-slug.mp4 instead of a content hash. Drag it into iMovie, attach it to a Slack message, anything you would do with a video file.

Why we built it this way

The original ask was simple: "I want actual files, downloadable and shareable." But the right answer was to make every format live on a stable, shareable URL, not just a download button. A URL means you can paste it into a Slack message and the recipient gets the file directly without hopping through WalkSpy. It means a chat preview can render the PNG inline. It means you can curl the GPX into a Strava upload script.

That pushed us to do something we had been avoiding: render the route over the actual basemap server-side. The polyline-on-paper version is fast and lightweight, but the on-map version is the one people actually want to share. So we built a real composite renderer that fetches map tiles, stitches them, and draws the route on top with proper attribution. It caches everything aggressively so the first request takes a few seconds and every subsequent request is instant.

What is next

The biggest thing missing is preview cards. Right now if you paste a walk page link into Twitter or iMessage, the preview is a generic OG image. The composite renderer we shipped today is the right primitive to fix that, we just need to wire it into the OG meta tags. Probably ships next week.

We are also looking at a multi-cam composite for walks recorded with more than one camera, and a 30-second highlight reel auto-generated from the most active part of the walk. Both need server-side video processing, which is a bigger project. They are on the list.

For now: open a walk, tap Files, and grab whatever format you need.

Also today: a Report button across the site

If you see something on WalkSpy that does not belong, you can now tell us about it directly from the page where you found it. There is a small Report link on walks, on individual comments and replies, on walk requests and walk offers, on bids, and on walker profiles. Pick a reason from a short list (spam, harassment, illegal activity, sexual content, surveils a private person, misleading, copyright, hateful, self-harm, something else), add a sentence of context if you want, and submit. Reports are reviewed promptly and we follow up where it makes sense.

You need to be signed in to file a report. That keeps the signal clean and lets us reach back if a reviewer has a question. Nothing about who flagged what is shown publicly.

Also today: every Stripe Connect currency

When we shipped multi-currency a couple of days ago, we turned on the 16 currencies that cover most WalkSpy use today. The full list Stripe Connect supports is closer to 135. Today we flipped the rest on. Walk requests, bids, tips, and Steering bounties can all be denominated in any of them. The site formats them with the right symbol and the right number of decimals (yen has none, kronor has two, francs CFA have none), and walkers get paid out in the currency their bank settles in. If you have ever wanted to price a walk in pesos, rupees, or kronor and never quite found the option, it is there now.