garmin "timeline" feature that's existed for more than a decade

Ordinarily, when one uses a modern Garmin DriveSmart 66 or DriveSmart 76, they see the Recent menu option from Where To? screen and think, "That's all there is?"

No. There's more.

Some wonder if a Garmin navigator has a Google Timeline-like feature. Yes, it does. The screenshot above is from my DriveSmart 76 using the Trip History feature. This is in every 66 and 76, but it's not from the Recent menu option. Instead, you choose Apps and then Trip History, and that's where you find it.

Is Recent different from Trip History? Yes, it's two separate things. With Recent, that's just a quick list of the locations you've navigated to. With Trip History, it shows how many trips you've taken sorted by date, total time spent traveling, total distance traveled, and each entry shows the exact departure and arrival times.

For privacy, yes, you can reset/delete Recent or Trip History or both. When on either screen, the top left hamburger menu is where you access the ability to clear the records. With Recent, the only option is to clear the entire list. With Trip History, you can clear the entire list, or select an individual entry first, and just delete that one.

A victim of poor naming?

Here's the interesting part:

The Recent list has been a feature in every single Garmin navigator going all the way back to 2005 as far as I know.

Trip History has been a feature since 2013, except it wasn't called that. It was called Where I've Been.

If you have an older model such as a nuvi 2597, nuvi 55, nuvi 67, DriveSmart 51, Drive 52 or DriveSmart 65 among several others, Where I've Been is located from Apps. It looks slightly different from the 66/76 Trip History but has the same functionality.

Most people never knew many older nuvi, Drive and DriveSmart models had this feature the whole time, but it's always been there and ready-to-use.

Published 2025 May 22