The map shows every photo of the current search that carries a GPS position, grouped into markers the way a photo app does it. It is drawn on OpenStreetMap; no Google account and no map key are involved.
- Map in the header of the photos screen opens the map framed around every photo of the current search and filters that has a position.
- Show on map, in the row of actions under a full-screen photo (tap a photo to open it), centres the map on that photo, at street level.
- The count at the top says how many pins are on the map. At most 1000 are placed at once, best matches first, so with more than that the number stops at 1000 rather than counting every photo with a place.
Photos close to each other on the screen are drawn as one marker: the thumbnail of the first photo and a count. The grouping follows the zoom, so to break a group apart you zoom in yourself, by pinching, double tapping, or the plus and minus buttons. Thumbnails are decoded from the photos on the phone, as in the grid.
- Tap a group and its photos open in a sheet, whatever the size of the group and whatever the zoom; tap one to open it full screen in the app, with the same row of actions and a swipe through the rest of the group. The sheet can be dragged up to fill the whole screen, so a place with a hundred photos is read as a grid.
- The sheet also says where here is: under the count of photos in the group it prints the commonest city and country of those photos, taken from what the photos themselves carry, and stays silent when none of them carries a place name.
- Tapping a group never zooms the map. Zooming is your own doing.
The magnifier in the header, between the count and Reload, turns the visible area into a filter: the centre of the map and the distance to its farthest corner become Within N km on the photos screen, keeping whatever you had typed. It is a Solr radius search on the photos' positions:
The point and the distance travel as bound parameters, like every other filter value. The radius can be changed afterwards on the filter sheet (0.5 to 100 km) or dropped with Anywhere.
- The map tiles come from
tile.openstreetmap.org, requested only while the map screen is open and cached on the phone afterwards. Those requests carry the area you are looking at, nothing else: no account, no photo. - The positions of the markers come from your own index. This is still a request to the index on every open and on every Reload: the pins are one of the few things the phone's own copy of the index does not answer, so the map asks even when the grid behind it has stopped asking.
- In dark mode the tiles are dimmed and slightly drained of colour rather than turned inside out, so the sea stays blue and the land still reads as land while the map sits with the rest of the app.