Make TikTok-Ready Video Maps

At first glance, AniMaps appears to be very slick.

It’s a route animator with built-in video export, and it feels made for sharing travel clips on social media. Drop in a global route and it turns it into a smooth, cinematic fly-through using MapLibre GL JS. The camera easing is silky, the line animation feels well-timed, and the whole thing lands right in that sweet spot between data viz and travel video aesthetic. Think: instant “Instagram travel reel,” driven by GeoJSON or GPX routes.

For long-haul journeys - multi-city trips, cross-country arcs, anything that benefits from scale - AniMaps works beautifully, helping you create lovely travel map video animations perfect for sharing on social media.

But things get noticeably less smooth when you zoom into non-global journeys.

Try dropping in something simple like a ten-mile walking route around London and AniMaps starts to wobble. Instead of hugging the streets, the camera keeps pulling back, almost resisting the idea of staying local. No matter how tightly you try to frame it, the view snaps outward toward a much more global perspective.

It feels like the tool is making a strong assumption: only global journeys are truly worth sharing.

Under the hood

The main issue here seems to be aggressive zoom constraints baked into the camera behaviour. Rather than adapting to the scale of the input data, the system appears to default to a wide, global viewing range that prevents truly local framing.

A more flexible approach would be to avoid a one-size-fits-all zoom limit altogether. Instead, the app could calculate each route’s bounding box on upload and then use fitBounds dynamically to set an appropriate zoom level based on the actual extent of the data. That way, a cross-country flight path and a small neighbourhood walk would each get camera framing that matches their scale, rather than being forced into the same global perspective.

Verdict

AniMaps is a genuinely elegant experiment in animated map storytelling, happiest when it’s thinking big. For global routes it sings. But for more localized journeys, your AniMaps video probably won’t go viral - at least not for the right reasons.