About & how to
Tiny Trails turns a routine into a board-game path of pictures: morning, bedtime, the scramble out the door. A grown-up builds the trail once. After that your kid follows it, hopping a buddy (a photo you upload) from picture to picture as each step gets done.
Build a trail
Make the trail
Tap + New trail on the home screen and give it a name like “Morning” or “Bedtime”. New here? Tap Try a sample trail instead to start from a ready-made one you can change.
Add the steps
In the editor, tap a tile under Common tasks (brush teeth, shoes on, the rest of the usual suspects). Or tap ✨ Make your own step, which takes a label plus an emoji, or a photo of the actual toothbrush. Drag rows by the handle to reorder; tap a label to rename it.
Choose the buddy
Tap Add next to “The buddy” and upload a photo of something your kid loves: the stuffed animal that goes everywhere, or the family dog. Pan and zoom to crop it. In a hurry? Tap one of the quick buddies (🐼 🐸 🐧 🐻).
Hand over the tablet
Tap ▶ Play. That's the kid screen. Big pictures, and nothing they can delete by accident.
How your kid plays
The steps become round pictures joined by a winding path that ends at a ⭐. The buddy sits on the current step, ringed in yellow. Two ways to move it, whichever suits your kid:
👆 Tap
Tap the current picture and the buddy hops along the path by itself. The easiest mode for little ones.
✋ Drag
Your kid drags the buddy onto the next picture and it snaps into place. Slower going, and better for kids who want to do it themselves.
Finished steps get a green ✓ and the counter at the top keeps score. Reaching the star sets off an “All done!” celebration. Progress is remembered, so a reload or a screen lock mid-routine doesn't lose their place.
The grown-up corner
Tap ⚙️ in the top corner of the play screen to:
- • Switch between 👆 Tap and ✋ Drag
- • ↺ Send the buddy back to the start for the next run
- • ✏️ Jump into the editor, or 🏠 back to all trails
There's a second grown-up corner at the bottom of the home screen, for backups.
Where everything is stored
Your trails and their photos stay on this device, inside this browser. There is no account to make and no sign-in, and nothing about your kid ever leaves the tablet. It all works in airplane mode.
The flip side: nothing is backed up for you. Use Grown-up corner · Backup on the home screen to download one file with everything in it, and keep it somewhere safe. You'll want it before you clear browser data or move to a new tablet. Restore from backup puts it all back.
Tips
- • Pictures show up as small circles, so photos read best with one subject, centered and filling the frame.
- • Use JPG or PNG. iPhone HEIC photos can't always be opened, which is usually why an upload fails.
- • Add it to the home screen from your browser's share menu. It opens full screen after that, with no address bar for small fingers to find.
- • Keep trails short. Five or six steps a kid can finish beats a complete list nobody gets to the end of.