Features

Sharing spots & maps

Updated 2026-06-13

Sharing spots & maps

Every spot and map you create in Viewpoint is private to your account by default. When you do want to share, there are two different ways to do it — and they do very different things:

  • Privately, with a specific person — invite someone by email to view (or edit) one of your maps or a single spot. Only the people you invite can see it. This is the everyday “send this to a friend” case.
  • Publicly, on the map — publish a single spot so any Viewpoint user who pans into the area can find it.

Both are account features: sharing in either direction (and browsing the public map) requires signing in. As a guest your spots are simply local and private — there’s nothing to share and no public feed to browse until you choose to sign in.

The default — everything is private

When you capture a spot or build a map it goes into your library and stays there. Nobody else can see it. No syncing to a feed, no opt-out required. Private is the floor; sharing is something you choose, one map or one spot at a time.

Sharing privately with someone

This is for handing a map or a spot to a specific person — a shooting partner, a friend you’re meeting on location — without it ever becoming public.

Inviting someone

From a map’s detail screen (or a single spot’s), tap Share to open Manage access. Enter the person’s email address and pick what they’re allowed to do:

  • Viewer — can open and browse the map/spot, read-only.
  • Editor — can also make changes; their edits sync back to everyone on the share.

As the owner you can additionally grant Admin — someone who can invite other people on your behalf. Then tap Send invite.

How the invite reaches them

The person you invite needs a Viewpoint account. The invitation lands inside the app, in their inbox under Notifications → “Shared with you”, with a push nudge so they notice it. Viewpoint doesn’t send them an email — the email address is just how you point the invite at the right account. They tap Accept, and the shared map or spot appears in their library, ready to use offline like their own.

What the other person sees

A shared spot or map shows its name, its location (GPS), and the camera settings (EXIF) on any attached photos to the people you’ve shared it with — that’s the data they need to find the place and recreate the shot. Your private notes and your favorites never travel, exactly as with public sharing (below).

Making their own copy

Anyone you’ve shared with can make a copy — a brand-new map or spot they fully own, with its own photos and notes, cut loose from yours. Editing a copy never touches your original, and changes you make later don’t reach a copy someone already took.

Leaving a shared spot

If someone shares a spot with you and you no longer want it, open Manage access on it and tap Leave shared spot. It’s removed from your library; the owner still has it, and they can re-invite you later. (Made a copy first? That copy is yours and stays.)

Seeing who has access, and stopping a share

From the same Manage access sheet the owner (and any admins) can see everyone who has access, remove a person, or cancel a pending invite. Removing someone stops the map/spot from syncing to them going forward — but, just like unpublishing a public spot, it can’t reach back and delete a copy they already made.

Part of the Online plan

Private sharing runs on our servers and needs an account, so it’s part of the Online plan. There’s no separate add-on or per-share charge beyond the plan itself.

Publishing a spot to the public map

Publishing is the other kind of sharing: instead of one named person, the spot becomes visible to every Viewpoint user who pans into the area on the map — the Map view of the Locations tab.

How publishing works

From a spot’s detail screen there’s a Sharing section near the bottom of the form. The current visibility is shown as a chip — Private or Public — and a button lets you flip it.

Tapping Make this spot public opens a confirmation sheet that spells out exactly what becomes visible. The publish doesn’t happen until you tap Make Public on that sheet. The same friction applies in reverse: unpublishing opens its own confirmation.

What becomes visible when a spot is public

The following are sent to the public map and shown to any signed-in Viewpoint user who pans into the area:

  • The spot’s location (latitude and longitude) and name
  • How precise that location is — if your phone only knew roughly where you were when you captured it, the reading it recorded travels with the spot, so someone browsing it sees the same “approximate” note and circle you do rather than a pin they would trust. It only ever says the point is less exact than it looks, never more. As on your own spots, that marking is on the spot’s own screen in the iPhone app — the Map tab, the widgets, Look Around and the AR picker still draw every pin the same way, and the web app does not show it yet.
  • Any photos you’ve attached
  • Composition notes — your photography intent, framing thoughts, gear pairing
  • Real-world access information — parking notes, hazards, permission contacts, etiquette notes

The spot’s creator identity is shown so other users can see who contributed it.

What stays private even after publishing

  • Private notes — the catch-all notes field on a spot. The name is the policy: these never leave your account, regardless of the spot’s sharing state.
  • Your favorites — whether you starred a spot is per-account state. It doesn’t follow the spot to other users.
  • Your sync state — when the spot was last refreshed, whether it’s pending an upload, etc., are all device-local.

Unpublishing

You can make a public spot private again at any time, from the same Sharing section. The spot disappears from the public map within a few seconds.

Important: other users who already saw your public spot may have saved it. Unpublishing removes it from the public map but does not retroactively delete copies others have already added to their own libraries. The same is true for any photos or text you shared while the spot was public.

If a spot needs to come down for a real-world reason — wildlife disturbance, landowner request, safety hazard you discovered — and unpublishing isn’t enough, get in touch via the support page and we’ll handle it directly.

The Sensitive marker — wildlife protection

The Sharing section has a separate Sensitive location toggle. When this is on, the spot is treated as wildlife-vulnerable (nesting sites, raptor roosts, threatened-species habitat) and the publish button is disabled — Viewpoint categorically refuses to share sensitive spots publicly, regardless of any other setting.

This is a deliberate, non-negotiable safeguard. There’s no “publish anyway” override. If you genuinely need to mark a spot sensitive after sharing it, the unpublish flow stays available even on sensitive spots.

You can toggle Sensitive on or off at any time without confirmation. Marking a spot sensitive doesn’t change any other data about the spot — only its eligibility to be made public.

The Sensitive marker governs public publishing. Privately sharing a spot with a named person is still allowed on a sensitive spot — you’re handing it to someone you chose, not listing it for everyone.

Browsing other people’s public spots

When you pan around the map (the Map view of the Locations tab) you’ll see two kinds of pins:

  • Filled pins are your own spots (the ones in your library).
  • Hollow pins, with a small person glyph in the centre, are other creators’ tier-2 public spots.

Tap a hollow pin and Viewpoint opens the spot’s full detail — a photo gallery, name, composition notes (focal length, framing, gear pairing), and the access info (parking, hazards, etiquette, permission contact). The view is read-only — you can’t edit somebody else’s spot, but you see everything you’d see in your own library’s spot view.

If the creator attached more than one photo to the spot, the detail view shows them as a gallery — up to five photos per spot, cover first, then in the order the creator chose. Each photo carries the creator’s own framing notes for that image (often different from the spot-level composition notes) plus any auto-captured camera settings the original phone or camera recorded: focal length, aperture, ISO, shutter speed, lens model. That’s the data a photographer actually needs to recreate the shot — which is the whole point of public sharing.

Photos stay on the server while you’re just browsing. Each image loads from Viewpoint’s servers when you open the spot — your device doesn’t permanently store other creators’ images unless you save the spot to your own library. That keeps the app small even if you browse hundreds of public spots; storage only grows when you commit to saving one.

Saving a public spot to your library

Tap Save in the top-right and the spot lands in your own library as a fresh copy — the location, name, composition notes, access info, and every photo from the gallery all carry over. At this point the images download to your device so your saved copy works offline, including the per-photo framing notes and camera settings the creator captured. Your saved copy is yours to edit, mark sensitive, or publish in turn; the original creator isn’t notified.

If you’ve already saved this spot, the Save button changes to Open — tap it to jump straight to your existing copy. No accidental duplicates. Detection works across every device you’re signed in on, so saving on your iPhone and then browsing the same spot from your iPad shows the Open shortcut.

If some photos can’t be downloaded right now (an expired link, a network drop), the spot still saves with whichever images did make it. Viewpoint tells you how many photos came across so you know whether to retry from the saved copy or add your own when you visit.

What loads, when

Public-spot pins refresh half a second after you stop panning the map. Two things to know:

  1. Zoomed too far out, you’ll see a hint to zoom in for public spots. Viewpoint refuses to load the whole world in one query (the area cap is roughly the size of a small country); zoom in to about a metro-area span and the pins appear.
  2. The pins are a live read, not a synced copy — they’re not stored on your device after you pan away. If you go offline, you keep your own spots but the hollow pins disappear.

Reporting content you’ve seen

If something looks wrong on a public spot — illegal content, the location is plainly misdirected, spam, harassment, or someone else’s photo posted as if it were theirs — long-press the public pin and pick Report this spot. The sheet asks you to pick a reason and lets you add a short note explaining what’s wrong.

Reports go to a small queue that a person reviews. Nothing gets removed automatically just because one person clicked report; we look at what was actually flagged. You can only have one open report against the same spot at a time — once a moderator acts on it, you can report it again if it reappears.

If you’d rather just stop seeing a particular spot on your own Map without reporting it, use Hide from my browse on the same long-press sheet instead. Hiding is private and doesn’t notify the creator. See How Viewpoint moderates uploaded photos for the full moderation picture.

A few practical notes

  • Private sharing and public publishing both run on our servers, so they’re part of the Online plan — no separate add-on or per-share / per-publish charge beyond the plan.
  • There’s no cap on how many spots you can publish, or how many people you can share with, from one account.
  • Other users can’t edit your published spot. They can save it to their own library and capture their own photos / notes against the same location; their copies are independent of yours. (A privately shared map or spot can be edited — but only by the people you gave the Editor role.)
  • The exact same rules apply across iPhone, iPad, and any future Viewpoint surfaces — sharing is a server-side state, not a per-device setting.