Geotagging

The argument, stated fairly

In 2018 Leave No Trace updated its social-media guidance to ask people to “avoid tagging (or geotagging) specific locations”, after a run of places were loved into damage by a single viral post. Jackson Hole's tourism board runs a Tag Responsibly campaign asking visitors to tag a generic region instead of the exact spot. The concern is not imaginary: a fragile place with one photogenic angle and a small car park can be changed permanently by attention it was never built for.

The counter-argument is also serious, and we are not going to pretend it away. “Don't tell anyone where it is” is a rule that quietly favours whoever already knows — people with the friend who grew up there, the guide, the time, the car. Plenty of thoughtful people have pointed out that keeping the outdoors a secret is not neutral, and that access has never been evenly distributed to begin with. A map that only the initiated can read is not a conservation policy. It is a club.

We do not think either side is being dishonest. They are optimising for different failures — one for the place, one for the person who has never been invited.

What we actually believe

We are not neutral, because our product is not neutral. We publish coordinates. So the useful thing is to say what we think that obliges us to do, rather than to claim a middle position we don't occupy.

The binary is the problem. “Tag” or “don't tag” is a question about whether people go. Almost every real harm people describe — the queue at the viewpoint, the widened path, the car park at 40 cars over capacity, the sunrise crowd — is about when and how many. Those are different questions, and the second one has an answer the first one doesn't.

Every spot on Photerra is a photograph, and a photograph knows when it was taken. Across a whole corpus, that is a record of when people actually stand somewhere: which months, which hours, which days nobody is there. Nobody else building a place map has that, because their places came from a business directory and a directory has no idea when anyone showed up.

So the position we are taking is this: the responsible thing to publish alongside a coordinate is not less information. It is the information that lets someone go at a time that costs the place less — and the nudge toward the quieter equivalent ten minutes away that nobody has photographed to death.

That turns “should we tell people about this place?” into “when should they go, and is there somewhere better for them anyway?” We think that is a better question, and we think we are unusually well placed to answer it.

What is actually built, and what isn't

We would rather be exact than impressive here, because a values page that overstates its own product is worth nothing.

• Built. Every spot carries the photograph it came from. You can already filter the map by the light a photo was taken in — morning, afternoon, golden hour, night — which is the same underlying signal pointed at a different question.
• Partly built. Capture time is present on most of the corpus but not all of it, because not every camera records it and not every photo keeps it. A “when is this place quiet” readout is only honest where the data is dense enough to mean something, and today that is true of some places and not others. We would rather show it in the places where it is real than everywhere in a form that is guessing.
• Not built. Automatic diversion to a quieter alternative. We know the shape of it and we have not shipped it.

What we already do

• Nobody pays to be featured. There are no ads and no sponsored spots on Photerra, so no place is ever amplified because someone bought the amplification. Whatever pressure a place gets from us, it got from people actually liking it.
• You can remove a spot. Any contributor can delete their own spot at any time, and it goes. If you have put something on the map and come to regret it, you are not stuck.
• Some places should not be on any map. We keep a suppression path for locations that are genuinely sensitive — private land, sacred sites, habitats where publishing a coordinate is the harm. If you know of one on Photerra, tell us at info@photerra.com and we will take it down. We would rather lose a good photograph than be the reason a place is ruined.
• We don't broadcast where you are. A spot publishes where a photograph was taken. It does not publish where you are now, and Quiet Mode lets you contribute without your name attached at all.

If you think we have this wrong

This is a position, not a proof, and it is the kind of thing that should change when someone shows us something we hadn't considered. If you work in land management, conservation, or tourism, or you just think we are reasoning badly, we would genuinely like to hear it: info@photerra.com.

Last reviewed 31 July 2026.