# Photerra

> Photerra is a social travel app for finding real photo-spots — places people
> actually photographed, pinned where the photographer stood — planning day-by-day
> itineraries, and handing off to booking partners for restaurants, flights, and stays —
> all in one flow. Free on iOS and Android. Every pin on the map is a real photograph,
> pinned where it was taken: traveler contributions first, extended with curated
> openly-licensed archive photography, credited on every photo.

## About

- [About Photerra](https://photerra.com/about): Why we're building this — every pin is a photo, depth before breadth, no dark patterns.
- [Where Photerra is live](https://photerra.com/where-we-are-now): Featured cities where the community has already mapped hundreds of real photo-spots, plus how to request the next city. The complete, browsable list of all 27 destinations is the Spots hub (see Destinations below).

## Product

- [Home](https://photerra.com/): Live map + mosaic previews, trip-in-four-taps walkthrough, bento feature grid, eight-city depth strip, FAQ, App Store + Google Play download.
- [How Photerra compares](https://photerra.com/compare): Side-by-side vs Google Maps, Wanderlog, AllTrails, Atlas Obscura, and AI trip planners, plus app-by-app cards for the travel trackers (Polarsteps, FindPenguins — they log where you've been; Photerra finds where to go). Photerra's data source is an original map of real photo-spots — traveler contributions first, extended with curated openly-licensed archive photography, credited on every photo — not the same business listings and recycled web data every other tool draws from. Differentiators: every photo was taken by a person standing there, pinned about where it was taken, search by time of day & light (golden hour), no sponsored spots and no paid rankings (the only ads are labelled affiliate booking links, which never affect which places you see), never sells your data, and no AI-generated photos or invented places (photo descriptions are model-written from the photograph and labelled as such on every destination page).
- [Road trips](https://photerra.com/road-trips): Plan a road trip around the real photo-spots worth stopping for along the actual drive — overlooks, pull-offs and small-town gems from real photographs pinned where they were taken, not a list of gas stations (e.g. San Francisco to Los Angeles down the PCH). Works for city walks and bike routes too.
- [Map your city](https://photerra.com/map-your-city): For locals — scan your camera roll into a private map of your city, publish the spots worth sharing, pinned where you took them, and earn the City Pioneer badge for places you put on the map first. Nothing is published without an explicit choice.
- [App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photerra/id1621490090): iOS app listing.
- [Google Play](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.photerra): Android app listing.

## Destinations

- [Browse destinations](https://photerra.com/spots/): Hub index of 27 destinations with their own pages (plus more places just getting started, listed as "growing"). Each destination page shows a real map with a dot at every spot's coordinate, plus photo galleries — grouped by named neighborhood where the place splits into them (e.g. Haight-Ashbury, Viejo San Juan) or under the destination's own name when it doesn't — with real photo counts. "A map of a place, with a name, full of pins," not a list of titled rows. Named places with enough photographs get their own page under the destination (e.g. /spots/san-francisco/golden-gate-park): its distinct views (up to 24; near-identical frames are dropped), the approximate coordinate to stand at (4 decimals, ~11 m — the medoid of the pins, not a gazetteer position), and when people shoot it (golden hour, daylight, blue hour, night — clock bands in the camera's own local time, and by month). Examples: [San Francisco](https://photerra.com/spots/san-francisco), [New York City](https://photerra.com/spots/new-york-city), [Los Angeles](https://photerra.com/spots/los-angeles), [Paris](https://photerra.com/spots/paris), [Rome](https://photerra.com/spots/rome), [Kyoto](https://photerra.com/spots/kyoto), [Sydney](https://photerra.com/spots/sydney), [Mexico City](https://photerra.com/spots/mexico-city).

## Public API

- [Nearby spots — example](https://api.photerra.com/api/public/nearby-spots?hub=sf&limit=10): `GET` with `?hub=<slug>` (sf/pdx/la/phi/sd/hi/np/mx) or `?lat=&lng=`. The two take different shapes: a hub returns the spots inside that city's fixed bounding box, newest first; a `lat`/`lng` point returns spots within 500 miles of it, nearest first. Both are capped by `limit` (no cursor or offset — ask for what you need). The response is a minimal projection: no accounts, no emails, no precise home locations; it does carry each contributor's public display name (or nothing, for anyone in Quiet Mode) and the photograph's approximate coordinate. Required params; bare URL returns 400.
- [Featured spots — example](https://api.photerra.com/api/public/featured-spots?limit=10): `GET` with `?limit=` up to 50. Returns engagement-ranked public spots.
- These are the endpoints the embeddable widget renders. Using them directly is fine; the attribution obligations the widget handles for you (credit the photographer; for openly-licensed archive photography, name the author, the licence and the source) then become yours.

## For businesses — the free embeddable widget

- [Photerra for business](https://photerra.com/for-business): The hub for **Photerra Nearby**, a free embeddable widget that puts a map and photo gallery of real travel spots near any location onto any website. Made for hotels, vacation rentals, tour operators, restaurants, travel blogs and tourism boards. Free with no account, no paid tier, no visitor tracking and no cookies; every photograph carries its credit. One line of HTML; renders in a sandboxed lazy-loaded iframe so it never blocks the host page.
- [Widget builder](https://photerra.com/embed/v1/configurator): The live tool. Pick a location, layout (compact grid, full gallery, strip, sidebar rail, badge), light/dark/auto theme, accent colour, background, corner radius and font; preview it against real data; copy the one line. No sign-up.
- [Help & troubleshooting](https://photerra.com/for-business/help): Why an embed isn't showing (script stripped by a CMS, delayed by an optimizer, blocked by a Content-Security-Policy), fixing the height, changing the location, privacy and cookie answers, photo credit obligations, and how to request a city. Support: info@photerra.com.
- Install guides per platform: [WordPress](https://photerra.com/for-business/wordpress), [Squarespace](https://photerra.com/for-business/squarespace), [Wix](https://photerra.com/for-business/wix), [Webflow](https://photerra.com/for-business/webflow), [Shopify](https://photerra.com/for-business/shopify), [any website](https://photerra.com/for-business/html).
- Honest limits: the widget renders inside an iframe, so it does **not** pass the host site any SEO benefit, and we say so on the pages rather than implying otherwise. Coverage is real where it exists and thin where it doesn't — locations are added deliberately, on request, not scraped.

## Policies

- [Privacy Policy](https://photerra.com/privacy)
- [Terms of Service](https://photerra.com/terms)
- [Community Guidelines](https://photerra.com/community-guidelines)

## Optional

- [Contact](mailto:info@photerra.com)