Dear community, it's the time of year again that I want to reflect on what went well in 2024 and what I need to work on to further improve this platform for you in 2025. Whether you're discovering beautiful photo spots, planning your next adventure, or contributing to our incredible community, your experience has always been my #1 priority.
This year was the first time I could dedicate myself fully to Locationscout after 10 years of building it as a side project, and I’m super satisfied with how much we accomplished - it’s more than ever before! But in the end, what truly matters is your opinion. All the exciting new features, performance upgrades, and countless improvements only have value if they make a real difference for you.
Let’s take a quick look back at what we achieved together this year - and I’d love it if you could grade my efforts at the end!
1. Enhanced Exploration Tools
- Around Me and Bookmark Board Revamp: Introduced a stunning new map overlay with spot type indicators (outdoor, indoor, drone) and seamless bookmark integration, helping users discover top spots nearby or at custom locations.
- Sun Positions: Added a detailed sun position feature on all platforms, enabling better planning for golden hour photography.
- Improved Search: Enabled multi-language search, an entire redesign in the iOS and Android app, and synonym support, making it easier to find destinations like “Deutschland” or “Gotham” (New York).
2. New Features for Photographers
- EXIF Data: Premium users or contributors can now view detailed photo metadata (camera, lens, settings) to learn from the community’s best.
- Spot Image Hints: Photos can now be labeled as “artistically retouched” or “questionable” to set expectations accurately.
- Spot Types & Visual Upgrades: Clear indicators for photo spot types in-app, paired with a more intuitive map interface.
3. Improved User Experience
- Weather: Added a quick-view weather option with real-time updates for easy trip planning, later improved with a compact view and colored weather icons for easy readability at a glance.
- Full German Translation: The entire app and its 226,000+ entries are now available in German, with more languages like Spanish and French planned.
- Imperial Units: Converting km to miles is now a thing of the past.
- Personalized Account Settings: Device-specific settings like language and dark mode are now linked to individual accounts.
- New Signup & Login Flows: Simplified registration and revamped app forms for a seamless onboarding experience.
4. Visual & Performance Enhancements
- New logo: As a result of months of work, I was finally able to reveal the new logo in February and some backstory about it.
- Faster Loading Speeds: Optimized images, an entirely new and highly scalable server infrastructure, and lots of improved access points, making the platform faster than ever, especially on mobile.
- Consistent Design Updates: New icons, improved animations, and polished visual elements across the platform.
- Newsletter Redesign: A visual rework makes the newsletter easier to read than ever with fewer visual distractions.
5. Giving Back
- Gift Cards: Designed as a perfect gift for photographers and travelers, complete with a €1 donation to environmental causes for each purchase.
- Environmental Impact: Protected an additional 500m² of Peruvian rainforest, bringing the total to 2,640m².
6. Content
- Huge Photography Guides: Thanks to Annika, Mathias, and Maximilian we released 2 new extremely detailed photo guides about Japan and Kyrgyzstan with lots of gorgeous photography and tips to visit these stunning countries yourself.
- Learn Videos: Together with our friends from iPhone Photography School we released some great videos to improve your drone and mobile photography skills in the Learn Section.
- Content Updates: Mia (my working student) and Yvonne (my wife) worked hard this year to improve the content even further, reaching 58.424 manual content updates. A huge thank you to the community at this point for all the suggestions and reports. You are the reason why they can be as effective as they are.
- Locations: Yvonne invested countless hours in cleaning up states and regions for various countries and added over 200 detailed descriptions with tips for your trip.
- Featured Spot Images: I featured and verified quite a lot of new images again, resulting in 880 featured spot images right now. All of them are manually checked, verified, and improved with content. Don't ask for the huge amount of tabs I've still opened to feature these images as well... ;-)
Thank you to our amazing Community
I want to take a moment to express my deepest gratitude to each of you in the Locationscout community. Your contributions - whether it’s uploading new spots, reporting issues, suggesting changes to spot content, sending thoughtful feedback emails, or financial support via a Premium subscription - are the heartbeat of this platform.
Every photo, idea, and suggestion you share helps us grow and improve, making Locationscout a better place for photographers and travelers alike. Your passion, creativity, and dedication inspire me every day, and I’m so thankful to have such an incredible community by my side.
Here’s to you - the photographers, explorers, and adventurers who make all of this possible. Thank you for being part of this journey!
Your honest Feedback means everything to me
I poured my heart into 2024, and now I need your thoughts! Check out the changelog with lots of screenshots or check the summary above, and give me a grade in the comments or via email to [email protected]:
A = Nailed it, couldn’t be better! What was your favorite update?
B = Solid effort, but room for improvement. What do I need to improve next year?
C = Decent, but I’ve got ideas for you! Can't wait to hear them!
Anything lower? Hit me with your feedback - I’m always listening and I deeply care about honest feedback because my #1 priority in 2025 will still be your experience and how I can further improve it.
All the best for 2025 to you and your loved ones.
Manuel
P.S. A huge thank you to Tim de Pater, Manuel Heidrich, Yup Nguyen, Stephan Tijink, Tim Hildesheim, Robert Lennartz, Felix Weis, Valera Pieŭnioŭ, Christine Burtseva, Ihar Koshaleu, Alexander Keck, Anastasia Narchuk, and Karen Steinkühler for all your support and opinions this year. And a huge thank you of course to our ambassadors for promoting Locationscout via Social Media. I hope I didn't forget anybody!
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