Questions, answered.

Google maps is great, but it has missing features and a bunch of bugs. I made this after getting increasingly frustrated with google maps for urbex.

• On Google Maps, you don't own your data, and it's clunky to export any of it. Google sometimes changes the services they offer or the data they let you export, which makes me uncomfortable.
• If you pin a lot of things, your google map gets really cluttered, and it's hard to unclutter it.
• You can't reliably choose an icon for a pin. You can choose an icon for a saved list, but if it's in multiple lists, google just picks which icon to show for you.
• You can't search or filter pins by metadata, like whether you've visited it or not. You can try to get past this by making more saved lists, but things get really tedious really fast.
• If you save a pin to an existing google place, and that google place disappears, your pin breaks. It no longer shows details when you click on it, and you can never delete it. It's just on your map forever. So you have to make another pin next to it, and just live with 2 pins for the same place, one of which can't ever be clicked on.
• Sometimes searching for pins doesn't work reliably. It works reliably enough that you rely on it... and then it suddenly doesn't work when you're relying on it and it makes you scream.
• Sometimes saving a pin to a list doesn't actually save it. This works differently on mobile and desktop, and I've occasionally discovered that a pin just didn't save.
• When saving a bunch of pins to a list, one after another, there's some kind of memory leak that causes the map to get more and more sluggish the more pins you open and save, until you need to reload the page.
• When saving a bunch of pins, sometimes you click on a brand new pin, click the save to list button, and it shows that new pin already in the lists you put the last pin in... even though it's not. To get it to save, you need to remove it from those lists, and then add it back to them again. Sometimes this doesn't work. If you just close the dialog, it doesn't save at all.
• There's no way to make smaller maps of just a few pins in any meaningful way.
• You can't upload photos, documents, etc, to a pin without making them public to everyone.
• ...and I could go on.

Google maps worked just well enough for me to keep using it for years. But eventually, I had to make something that did the things I wanted, the way I wanted them.

Not really.

It's almost the opposite. This is an antisocial media site.

Social media sites center around sharing things broadly, and only reel it in as exceptions. Everything is some version of "public" by default, because that's the point of social media. So it's easy to find people, and to be found, and easy to make your thoughts and content visible to the world.

UrbanLens centers around private tools, just for you. The social components of the site are the exceptions to the core functionality, and that core functionality doesn't require anyone else to be a useful tool. Here, it's easy to be invisible, and easy to keep your content private, just for you.

Yes, as in speech and beer; UrbanLens is free, and open source. It's run by one person, who pays for hosting, and every other expense out of pocket. Some external APIs are limited for that reason. You can check out the source code on our GitHub page.

It's not out of the question that I'll offer subscriptions in the future to access some features that would cost me a lot of money to support. For instance: AI tools. If I do that, I won't ask anyone to pay for stuff that doesn't cost me money. The point is to make a tool for people, not to create a business.

Really? That's the standard for success? Come on.

It depends on what you mean by "reliable". But, no.

UrbanLens is still in beta, and I'm still working on it. I wrote the code all from scratch, and it's hosted on my own server that I built myself in my basement. I can't stress enough that I'm just one person.

I promise to do my best to keep the site up and protect any data you store on it. But you should not store anything on this site that you don't have another copy of somewhere else, and you shouldn't give up any other tools you're currently using quite yet.

I've put a ton of work into ensuring that you can use the site anonymously until you make an intentional decision to be more public. If you want even more anonymity, you have three options:

1. You can run the code on your own hardware, and then your data will never leave your network. This requires some technical knowledge, but I've tried to make it easy, and I'm willing to help if you get stuck. You will not have any community features this way, unless you invite a bunch of friends to be your community.
2. You can use this site, but register from a proton email address and use a fake name. I go out of my way not to store information about you. You can verify that yourself by asking your favorite AI to assess the code.
3. You can disable 3 groups of features during registration, which will really limit your experience, but if that's your thing, I support you. If you do that, you will be prevented from opting in to sharing your stuff, even if you try.

Yes - you can import pins from a whole bunch of other places. Every imported pin is shown to you for review before anything is saved. See the pin import guide for details.

Yes. Trips support RSVPs, member management, and shared itineraries with per-trip and per-pin privacy controls, so you can coordinate an expedition without exposing pin details. Only people you invite to the trip can see anything, and even then, you can make some pins even more private; people on the trip who don't have the pin will see "Secret Location", until you're ready to share the exact location. Is this overkill? Probably.

I like automating things. So I automated things.

There are lots of ways to make this easier.

• If your pins are in saved lists in Google Maps, you'll be given a chance to create different tags for each list that you import, so you don't have to redo the organizational system you already set up.
• During import, you can click a checkbox to have an AI help you tag them, too. It does its best. Try not to hurt its feelings.
• When you upload photos, you can have UrbanLens read GPS coordinates from the EXIF metadata and suggest a matching pin.
• A friend of mine had a loose text file of notes about places... so I support that, too. Upload a text file and an AI will help out. Your mileage may vary.
• Importing your location history can automatically make pins for you, if you want it to. The location history file is deleted immediately, just like all the other stuff you import.
• If you want to add friends, you can tag each other in trips you've been on, and that will make pins and mark things as visited for both of you. (You still have to click an "accept" button, because consent is a thing.)
• You can opt in to marking places as visited just by logging into the site while you're there. You have to have reception for this, and it doesn't really seem like the easiest way to do it, but it works.
• Group trips make pins. So do safety checkins. And as many other things as I could think of.
• Once you have your pins here, you can nest them into categories and tags in a whole bunch of configurations, which lets you search and filter in cool ways. Like... you could make your map only display pins that are in the "church" and "want to go" categories, but not in the "no entry" or "demolished" categories, and then you can keep adding filters onto that.

I'm just one person, and I bought a lot of hard drives, but I don't have unlimited space. I gave a few GB to people I've never met, and a little bit more to my friends. It adds up pretty fast.

You can see how much space you have on your profile page. Uploaded images are automatically optimized to help you fit more within your quota without losing meaningful detail.

The site tries its best to pull in supplementary data, and filter out the junk that doesn't apply. So it can show things like Wikipedia summaries, historical imagery, weather, and relevant public datasets - to help you research a location before you visit.

When these external APIs are contacted, we only send the minimum amount of data needed to get a relevant response. That usually means just the name of the place, or the coordinates.

You can turn this off during registration, or from your settings page.

Yes. Any data we store about you is visible on your own profile page or your account Settings - there's no hidden user data on UrbanLens that isn't displayed back to you. We don't even store your ip.

But it's time for another reality check about ip addresses.

UrbanLens relies on services from other open source software, too, like a web server to handle your web traffic, a caching layer to make the site fast, and more. Some of those services see details about you, like your ip address, just because of the nature of web traffic. Sometimes those details are put into log files. I rotate those log files regularly, and no one without access to my server could ever see them in the first place... but, that's no reason not to use a VPN. They cost like $3 a month.

The site data is stored on a RAID 10 array, so multiple drives need to fail before any data is lost. It's backed up as reasonably close to 3-2-1 as I can manage. The drives are encrypted on the server at rest, and only decrypted when the server is online. Any sensitive data in the database is also encrypted at rest on top of that. HTTPs also encrypts your data in transit, and direct messages are end-to-end encrypted on top of everything above.

Regular database backups are run automatically and kept for a long time. Cloudflare, and other infrastructure, provide several additional protections for site reliability. The codebase has a rigorous CI/CD process that tests it for vulnerabilities every time it's changed, and it's automatically run through an AI that tries to identify any issues that managed to sneak in.

There's also an export tool, so you can make your own backups and import them somewhere else any time you'd like.

I could go on. I'm proud of it... but you still shouldn't count on it to store anything you can't bear to lose.

Yes. Account deletion is available from your profile settings and removes your personal data from UrbanLens. The site gets rid of all of it, and I really mean all of it.

You have 1 week to undo the deletion, and during that time your data will still exist on our servers in a separate backup file that isn't visible on the site. If you don't undo the deletion, your data will be gone forever.

There's an export tool you can use to get a copy of your data before you do that.

Your direct messages are end-to-end encrypted. That's a fancy way of saying: they're scrambled on your device before they're sent, and only you and the person you're talking to can unscramble them. Even if someone hacked into the site and stole the entire database, they wouldn't be able to read your messages.

To make that work, your browser generates a secret key for you the first time you log in. That key is what actually unlocks your messages. Normally you never think about it - your password unlocks it automatically, on any device, every time you log in.

The recovery key is a backup plan for the one situation your password can't cover: if you ever reset your password using the "forgot password" email link, the site can't use it to unlock your old key the normal way. Same thing if you signed up with Google or Discord and never set a password at all, and you're logging in from a brand new device. In both of those cases, the recovery key is what lets you keep reading your old encrypted messages instead of losing access to them.

So... save it somewhere safe when the site shows it to you. A password manager is perfect for this. If you ever lose both your password-based access and your recovery key, there's genuinely no way for anyone, including me, to get your old encrypted messages back - that's the tradeoff for that level of privacy. You can always start fresh with a new key from Settings, you'll just lose access to messages sent before that point.

One caveat: attachments like photos and shared maps in direct messages aren't encrypted yet, just the text of the messages themselves. Also... this only protects against someone getting a copy of the database - it doesn't protect you if someone in the real world steals your unlocked phone. Obviously.

Yes - the full source is on GitHub. Contributions are welcome, and we just ask that any contributed code align with the principles on our Values page.

UrbanLens is built and maintained by one person, not a company. It started as a personal tool for me, then for a small circle of friends, and it's growing from there.