Location stamping

With location stamping, a guest can choose to save where their phone is when each photo is sent. It is meant for inspections, site visits, and events spread over many places. At a wedding in one venue it adds little. New in version 2.0.

Three people say yes

A location is saved only when all of these are on. Every one of them starts off.

1. You turn it on for your site, under Settings, Location stamping, and include Location stamping in the plans you want. See Plans.
2. The host turns on Let guests add their location to photos for one event, in Event settings.
3. The guest ticks Add my location to these photos on the upload screen, and then allows it when their phone asks.

The tick box says what is saved and who can see it before the guest ticks it. A guest who says no still uploads as normal.

What is saved, and where

• The latitude and longitude the phone reports when each photo is sent, and how accurate the phone said it was.
• It is saved in the database only. It is never written into the photo file, which is still cleaned of its own location data exactly as before. See Security.
• Photos only. Videos never get a location.
• It comes from the browser at upload time, not from the photo file, so it is where the guest is when they send the photo.

On the guest's phone

• The first position can take up to half a minute, mostly indoors. The photos keep sending while the phone looks, and the screen says Finding your location... until it knows.
• Some phones, such as Android with Chrome, let the guest share an approximate location instead of the exact one. That is only good to about a neighborhood, and the photo page shows it as a large "Accurate to" distance.
• If the phone cannot find a position, the photos are sent without one, and the screen says so.

Who sees it

• The host sees it on the photo page, with an Open in map button, and a small pin on the gallery tile.
• It is in locations.csv in the ZIP download, and in the photo report when the host ticks it.
• Guests never see anyone's location, not even their own, and it is never in the guest gallery or the slideshow.

Open in map is a plain link to OpenStreetMap that opens in the host's own browser. GuestLens does not call any map service, and it does not turn coordinates into place names.