Maybe the wording is confusing in the Readme. Reitti will try to fetch the data from a configured photon instance first, if this does not return anything and you have Geocoding services configured, it will try them. There is actually no switch for hybrid mode or only local. It depends on what is configured.
Photon Only: you have only photon configured and under Settings > Gecoding
you deleted or disable every available service.
Hybrid Mode: Photon is configured and under Settings > Geocoding
there are Services available. That es is the one I use. Having Photon with the data for Germany and all the rest is handled by Geoapify.com.
External Only: You dropped Photon from the docker-compose file and only rely on services under Settings > Geocoding
If you do not configure anything, then Reitti will skip Geocoding and only display Unknown Place.
I will update the Readme to make that clear.
I was thinking about that, but the main problem is that we do not store all the data which comes in.
If we ingest data from an app, I am pretty sure that the quality of the data is actually usable. But for example if we import an Records.json from Google Takeout. The quality of the earlier years is somewhat sketchy. For this we filter out some points like travelling with over 2000 km/h, sudden direction changes etc and they are lost forever. At least for Reitti they are unknown.
The feature would need a lot of explanation why the data we export is not the same we import.That is the reason I did not implemented it even if it would come in handy for testing stuff. Handling GPX files is a pita ...