How to Make a Map of Countries You've Visited
A visited-countries map is the best souvenir you'll ever make. Here are the four ways to build one — paper, custom Google map, photo edit, or a tracker — and which to pick.
A map of everywhere you've been is the rare souvenir that gets better every year. There are four common ways to make one, and they trade off effort against how good (and how shareable) the result is.
1. The paper scratch map
A poster where you scratch off a foil layer over each country you visit. Cheap, tactile, looks great on a wall.
Downside: it lives in one room, you can't share it, and once you've scratched a country there's no "want to go" or "lived in" — just done or not done. Good as decor, limited as a record.
2. A custom Google map
Google "My Maps" lets you drop pins and color regions. Free and flexible.
Downside: it's fiddly. Coloring whole countries by hand is slow, the styling is clunky, and it doesn't compute anything — no "percentage of the world," no continent breakdown. Fine for a one-off, tedious to maintain.
3. Edit an image yourself
Download a blank world map and fill in countries in an image editor. Total control over the look.
Downside: it's a manual art project you have to redo every time you travel. Most people make one and never update it.
4. A travel tracker
A purpose-built tool: click countries, set a status (visited, lived-in, want-to-go), and it draws the map and does the math for you.
Why it wins for most people: it's the only option that's fast to update, computes your stats (percent of the world, continents covered, countries vs territories), and gives you a link to share. The map stays current because updating it is one click after a trip.
The four side by side
| Scratch map | Google My Maps | Image editor | Tracker | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Time to set up | Minutes | An hour or two | An afternoon | Minutes |
| Time to update | Seconds | Minutes | Redo the work | One click |
| Shareable link | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| Stats (% of world, continents) | No | No | No | Yes |
| More than one status | No | Sort of | Yes, manually | Yes |
| Looks good on a wall | Yes | No | Yes | No |
The honest summary: the scratch map wins on the wall, the tracker wins everywhere else.
Which should you pick?
- Want wall decor? The scratch map.
- Want a one-time art piece? Edit an image.
- Want a living record you'll actually keep updated and share? A tracker.
A decision that trips people up: whether territories count. Greenland, Hong Kong and Puerto Rico all feel like separate destinations but belong to a parent country, and how you treat them changes your number. That's the same argument covered in how many countries there are and what counts as visiting one.
Destli's country tracker is the fourth option: mark countries in seconds, see your percentage of the world and continents covered, toggle territories on or off, and share a public map at destli.com/yourname. From there you can browse destinations by country to plan the next pin.
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