Hi. I’m John, the creator of Photo Find.
Photo Find is all about exploring and finding your way.
GPS is pretty amazing. It has only been around since 1995, and it lets us reference any exact place on Earth with two decimal numbers. Even so, it can be annoying to keep track of coordinates or save and share pins. Photo Find lets you save, return to, or share an exact location without sending around map pins or numbers. I think it is the simplest way to get back to the exact location on Earth where a photo was taken.
First for foraging
The idea came about while I was hiking with my friend Casey Inman, who is into foraging wild foods. He had taken classes on identifying edible plants and mushrooms around the Northeastern United States, where we live near Syracuse, NY.
After a few weeks of hikes, we started finding some awesome mushrooms growing out of trees (not the trippy kind). Many were big enough to take home right then. But some were not ready yet, even though they might be in a few weeks or months.
I knew every photo I took with my iPhone had GPS coordinates saved in it. So I started taking pictures of these small mushrooms, hoping we would be able to get back to them later.
Can I already see my photos on a map?
I knew I could see all my photos on a map in the Photos app on every iPhone, so I thought that would be helpful. In practice it was not.
The map inside the Photos app did not show my current location. So I had to switch back and forth between that and Google Maps, which had my location and a small compass arrow for the direction I was facing. That was already hard, since we were in the middle of nowhere with few landmarks to match up.
We were also hiking in places with no designated paths. We were just in the woods. Heading back to the car was its own problem, since we did not know exactly what direction to go. I tried tracking our hikes with apps like RunKeeper to retrace our route. It worked OK for getting back to the car, but it was not a great system for marking spots.
So I thought: would it not be useful to have a giant arrow that just pointed at the place where a photo was taken? That is Photo Find.
How it works today
Modern iPhones quietly save the location of every photo you take, as long as the Camera app has permission to use location. That data sits inside the image file. Photo Find reads it and turns it into something you can follow on foot: a compass arrow pointing at the place, with the distance left to go.
Photos sent through Messages keep their location. Photos sent through email usually do too, if the sender does not resize them. Photo Find works with both. It also reads photos pasted from the clipboard and shared from the Photos app.
No account. No tracking. No subscription. The arrow points at the place.