April 2024
contributed by:
Manuel
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Imperial Units ·
I know this feature may not be relevant to everyone, but I really care about each of you and displaying distances as miles has been requested a lot. Converting km to miles is now a thing of the past, yay! I've even made sure this is synced across all devices and is preset for your country, but you can always change it in the settings.
What's released
Getting better each day. With the help of this awesome community, we already made
45.256 manual spot content improvements.
45.256 manual spot content improvements.
March 2024
contributed by:
Manuel
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Explore Redesign ·
It's spring and that's a good reason for a spring clean with a new 'app home page' that contains fewer elements with the same functionality and therefore focuses more on beautiful photos, while making the search and the app settings in the top right easier to recognize for new users.
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Search Redesign ·
The search received an even bigger redesign with preview images, highlights for popular locations, a local search history to make switching between different places a lot faster, random search suggestions if you need inspiration, and a beautiful fade out effect behind the searchbar when you scroll down.
What's improved
- The iOS and Android app is now up to 37% smaller, resulting in a size of only ~12 MB on Android.
- The country and location sliders on Explore are now loading the images based on if they are visible or not, improving this feature for bigger screens where the 3rd and 4th image were loading before based on the slider position.
- Improved the clickable area of the 'spots nearby' button on the spot map and updated the icon to something easier to understand.
- Redesigned boards on the website to show an even bigger map while visually matching the current location and country design.
February 2024
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New Logo ·
Carefully designed to match what this community is actually about - finding, sharing and enjoying these beautiful places to create and remember ("bookmark") memories for a lifetime. But it's also about bookmarking your favorite spots or hiking to this special place at the top of a mountain (if you only look at the dark parts of the logo) while leaving your comfort zone and overcoming your personal hurdles.
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Weather ·
After many weeks of hard work, I'm finally happy with the high quality of the new weather dashboard within the iOS and Android App that helps you to decide when to visit or switch to another spot based on real-time weather conditions.
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Looks great in light or dark mode, depending on what you like best.
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Login and Border Redesign ·
With the new logo, it was also time for a modern login screen. And with that I also updated all the rounded corners on the platform to better match the current design and have a consistent look.
What's improved
- Spots in the app now load much faster. It also prevents the rare problem of the app reloading if too many spots were opened too quickly under iOS.
What's released
January 2024
- New and highly scalable server infrastructure · Together with Tim, we moved the entire platform to a new, highly scalable server infrastructure at the end of the month, which enables us to keep usage stable even in times of high traffic.
- Subscription Cancellation Overview · I really care about your experience with Locationscout Premium and this also means that if you want to cancel your subscription, for whatever reason, it should be as easy as possible for you. The new overview page is showing everything in detail.
What's improved
- Image grids now load each image based on your scroll position to ensure that what you are currently viewing is prioritized and to save you bandwidth for content you are not yet seeing.
December 2023
contributed by:
Manuel
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Free Premium Trial ·
With the full redesign of the Premium page inside the iOS and Android app, I'm introducing an often-requested free trial period where you can simply try out all the great features straight away. Alternatively, the website still offers a 100% money-back guarantee, which I can't offer via iOS or Android.
What's improved
- Premium has some beautiful new animations that show how easily you can benefit from the most powerful features such as Around Me, Custom Positions or Direct Navigation.
November 2023
contributed by:
Manuel
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Navigation 2.0 ·
This is one of my favorite updates to the app this year, because I've put a lot of effort into making it even easier to plan a trip on the go. The new navigation button automatically shows you the travel time based on current traffic, and when you tap it, ...
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... you will see everything you need to make a quick decision: Distances and times, how far the parking lot is from the spot, what the weather will be like when you arrive, and whether you have enough time to get there by sunset or sunrise.
What's improved
- The app has a new degree setting to switch from Celsius to Fahrenheit which is automatically synced from and to your web account. If you are from the US, Fahrenheit is therefore set automatically for you.
October 2023
contributed by:
Manuel
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Location & Country Redesign ·
The fully redesigned pages inside the iOS and Android app are cleaner and easier to use while adding new features like 'Related Locations' and more tips for your trip. Opening the map will increase the map area with a beautiful animation to give it as much space as possible.
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New Onboarding & Login Redesign ·
The app received a new design right before you log in with a swipeable 'How it works' section and a redesigned login.
- New Font · The app has a beautiful modern font now to improve readability and align with the website. In the next versions, I will make sure to revise smaller texts to give you an even better user experience.
What's improved
- A new setting on iOS allows you to disable the standard swipe back gesture (drag the screen from the left to go back to the last page) if you are experiencing issues on smaller devices with the pinch zoom gesture on maps.
- Maps inside spots now have a dedicated zoom control in the bottom right corner.
- The feeds now load much smoother with images fading in nicely as they load.
- In-app notifications are now displayed above the bottom navigation bar, not just at the bottom, which prevented the navigation bar from being used for 2 seconds.
- In addition to numerous technical improvements in the app, there is a new feature that loads content sections only when they become visible to reduce mobile data transferred and improve loading speed.
September 2023
- New Premium Design · With the new Premium Page, I am introducing a 100% money-back guarantee for 30 days on annual subscriptions so you can try it out for yourself without any risk. After working over 9 years 24/7 to build this platform while talking to thousands of users about their constructive feedback, I'm so convinced that Premium will be extremely valuable to you as well.
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Spot Types ·
With the new Spot Types feature, we can finally distinguish between outdoor, indoor, and drone spots. Each spot now shows this type, which can be set in the spot uploader or edited directly in the spot. Please add only photos of the same type to a spot and if you have taken photos from inside and outside a cathedral, split them into different spots.
August 2023
contributed by:
Manuel
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New Homepage ·
The external homepage finally got a big redesign with beautiful animations and testimonials from the community, helping new visitors to understand what this platform is about.
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Bookmarking just got easier and faster ·
This full redesign of the bookmarking feature in the iOS and Android app improves visuals and speeds up the process with a swipeable overlay that automatically closes after adding a spot. Your recent boards stay on top to make trip planning easier.
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We just saved another 500m² of rainforest in Canada ·
To fight climate change, we invest part of the revenue through Premium subscriptions in environmental projects around the world, already resulting in 2140m² binding over 178 565 kg CO2.
What's improved
- When you sign up, you will now be redirected to the last opened page after your first login. This allows you to seamlessly continue your research where you left off.
- Search results are now ordered by how well the result fits to your query and how relevant the result in general is.
- Faster loading time for static pages and blog articles, especially on mobile devices.
July 2023
contributed by:
Manuel
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Verified Spot Images in the App ·
To further increase the quality of the content and ensure that you will always find the spot, the state of a spot image is now shown in the app as well. Spot images can be marked as verified by a mod if it is 99% certain that this photo was taken at the marked spot position.
What's improved
- The premium status is now checked more often in the app to ensure a smoother experience when upgrading to Premium via the website.
- Images in grids will now fade in smoothly in the iOS and Android app.
June 2023
- Improved Search · A completely new search backend will now lead to much better search results that work with special characters, typos and much more. And that's just the first step in making it as easy as possible to help you find what you're looking for.
- New Onboarding · An entirely revamped set of welcome emails will help new users get the most value out of the platform for themselves.
May 2023
contributed by:
Manuel
What's improved
- Some articles now have much wider images, making them much more beautiful or their content easier to read.
April 2023
contributed by:
Manuel
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Spot Merge Tool ·
This is probably the most complex tool I've implemented so far, but we're finally able to merge duplicate spots to work off the reports we've received from the community. This is a next big step to improve the quality of the content even further.
- Spot Split Tool · To ensure that the geo-position for each photo is as accurate as possible, we are now also able to split a photo to an entirely new spot. Both tools are internal for now, but this one could be available to the community later.
What's improved
- A small gift icon in the navbar is now indicating bigger platform updates.
March 2023
contributed by:
Manuel
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Deep Linking and Sharing ·
The app now automatically opens links to the Locationscout website when it's installed on your device. This makes planning a trip with others and sharing spots, locations or countries via messaging or social media easier than ever.
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Featured Spots highlighted in Around Me and Spots Nearby ·
My main goal is to make sure you don't miss the best spots. That's why Around Me now highlights spots that have a featured photo in a special color. Colored markers indicating the popularity of each spot are now also available within spots for Spots Nearby.
- Toggle Password Visibility in Login Form · Especially on mobile it can be tricky to hit the right characters. The app login now has a new feature to show the typed in password when you tap on the eye icon.
- 50% higher Upload Image Size · After a transition phase I finally removed the old image uploader and increased the max filesize from 8 to 12MB. This should also result in a smoother upload experience.
What's improved
- Improved the spot overlay for all maps inside the app which is now fading the recently selected spot preview image instead of showing the one of the last spot until the new one is loaded.
- Visually improved Around Me by making the dropdown to access the Custom Positions feature easier to see and use with bigger fonts and spacing. The current radius is now immediately shown in the top right and can be changed by tapping on the icon.
- Changing the radius is now immediately possible when creating or editing a Custom Position in Around Me to get immediate feedback about the number of spots around the selected position for a specific radius.
February 2023
What's released
January 2023
contributed by:
Manuel
- Redesigned Country and Location Page · With this complete redesign, the country and the location pages are much clearer than before, putting the most important info in the spotlight. New sections help find related regions, cities and more, while the content itself will expand over time.
- Location Redirects · One of the best aspects of user-generated content is the variety it provides, but it's also important to maintain it and make it visible. That's why a location like Köln, the German spelling for Cologne, will now show a big hint where you can find all spots, and if you add Köln as a location tag to your spot, the system will automatically add Cologne as the correct tag.
- Significant Performance Improvements · My spring cleaning is already behind me and besides a big code cleanup I have technically reworked the most important pages and improved their performance significantly, resulting in up to 4 times (!) faster page speed.
What's improved
- With the new fixed height of the map inside a country or location, it's finally possible to use the scrollwheel to zoom the map.
- A new setting in your profile allows you to fully hide it from Google and non-logged in users. Accounts with no uploaded spot images are always hidden for Google by default.
December 2022
contributed by:
Manuel
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We just saved another 520m² of rainforest in Canada ·
To fight climate change, we invest part of the revenue through Premium subscriptions in environmental projects around the world, already resulting in 1640m² binding over 148 565 kg CO2.
- New Spot Image Slider & Button Design · This is the biggest update to the spot page yet, with a completely new slider (the old one had problems with Safari) that gave me the opportunity to rework quite a bit. Images are now displayed individually to give them the attention they deserve and a counter in the top right shows the number of images inside the spot. All buttons have been redesigned and repositioned, individual image sizes for each screen resolution with lazy and smart preloading further improve loading time and much more.
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Verified Spot Images ·
With this new feature, spot images can be marked as verified by a mod if it is 99% certain that this photo was taken at the marked spot position. This further increases the quality of the content and ensures that you will always find the spot. Verified users will also be able to verify images in the future.
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Redesigned Spots in App ·
Spot images are now instantly swipeable, display the photographer, and can be liked without having to enter full-screen mode. A revised layout, larger typography, and a repositioned bookmark button make this view easier to use on the go.
- Better & faster Images in the App · Images inside the app are now also displayed in modern image formats with higher resolution and smaller file sizes to further improve loading speed while saving you mobile traffic. Old iOS devices will have access to new jpg formats as a fallback.
What's improved
- Images in spots in the app are now lazy loading, saving you even more mobile traffic. The teaser is not preloading at all, and the full-screen mode is only preloading the images around the selected one to ensure a seamless swiping experience.
November 2022
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Better & faster Images ·
After working on this big change for so long, it's a bit sad that you hopefully won't even recognize it. Thanks to the great efforts of Stephan, he and I have implemented a completely new image resizing service that converts all uploaded images to new image formats like 'webp', resulting not only in much better image quality, but also much smaller file sizes and thus faster loading pages, especially on mobile devices.
- Goodbye Cookie Hint · By getting rid of Google Ads and replacing Google Analytics with a cookie-free and privacy-focused alternative, I can finally lead by example and make the web a better place without cookie-based tracking or advertising.
What's improved
- Images in grids are now loaded independently, which significantly increases the speed until you see the grid and individual photos smoothly fade in.
October 2022
contributed by:
Manuel
- Goodbye Google Ads · It was finally time to replace these annoying Google ads. This will result in a lower income for me again, but the shown ads (50% scam) and how they affected the user experience were not in line with my conviction and integrity for long enough now. The new ads are designed by me and will only recommend things I would buy or use myself.
- Editable Locations and Themes · While the title and content of spots had been editable for years, now anyone can also edit the locations and themes directly in the spot to further improve the content.
September 2022
contributed by:
Manuel
- New Icons · With the new version of the iconset, I fully reworked how they are integrated, resulting in 90% file size reduction and therefore a lot faster loading speed, especially on mobile phones where pages with very few or no images are less than half the size now.
- Performance · Fully reworked how fonts are loaded in modern browsers, resulting in much faster loading with less traffic used.
What's improved
- Improved finding a country within the Spot Uploader to solve the very rare but annoying 'We couldn't find a country for this spot.'-issue.
- Improved 'Forgot Password' feature by displaying a notice when the account is not yet enabled and therefore the email cannot be sent. I also enabled the use of this feature while logged in, which is helpful if you actually forgot the password to log in to the app, but are still logged in to the website and therefore redirected to the home feed.
August 2022
contributed by:
Manuel
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Colored Markers in Around Me ·
With version 1.1.15, Spot Markers in Around Me within the iOS and Android app are now colored according to their popularity to ensure that you don't miss the most interesting spots and regions.
- What's new inside the App · A new beautiful modal will show you the latest bigger feature updates inside the app when you login to the new app version for the first time.
July 2022
contributed by:
Manuel
- Around Me became Around Anywhere · With version 1.1.14, the iOS and Android app now have a fully reworked Around Me feature with a beautiful split view and Custom Positions that you can create for places you want to visit and immediately see what's nearby.
- About us · Since I get this question a lot, I thought it was time to create an About Us page where I share the journey of the platform and who is helping me improve it.
June 2022
contributed by:
Manuel
- The app for iOS and Android got a full redesign · With the latest version 1.1 the apps finally have a beautiful Explore tab with lots of inspiring places for your next trip, a gorgeous Dark Mode, easier access to Search and Bookmarks, and lots of other improvements.
May 2022
contributed by:
Manuel
- We just saved another 480m² of rainforest in Canada · To fight climate change, we invest part of the revenue through Premium subscriptions in environmental projects around the world, already resulting in 1120m² binding over 117 t CO2.
- Search Aliases · Searching got even easier now with aliases that ensure you find the right Location or Country by showing you a suggestion when you searched for 'Köln' but the actual Location with many more Spots is called 'Cologne'.
April 2022
contributed by:
Manuel
- Change password in profile settings · You finally don't need to use the forgot password feature anymore to set a new one. You can simply change it now in the profile settings.
What's improved
- Improved loading speed for board spot and map view significantly.
- Fixed a bug with South Korea not having a separate country page because South and North Korea were both named identical as 'Korea'.
January 2022
contributed by:
Manuel
- Climate protection · The new Environment page reveals our latest new partnership with Wilderness International to fight climate change via wilderness sponsorships in rainforests in Canada and Peru.
December 2021
October 2021
contributed by:
Manuel
What's improved
- New users will now see an onboarding when logging in for the first time on the website.
- You are finally able to see the current newsletter subscription status in your profile settings and change it from there.
September 2021
contributed by:
Manuel
- What's new · This beautiful new page now helps you to stay up to date with the latest new features, improvements and content releases. Even though I am only a solo-developer working on this platform, there are quite a few awesome external people helping me to release so much new stuff for you on a regular basis. Feature suggestions via mail are always highly appreciated.
- Explore · Get inspired for your next trip by the entirely new Explore page.
- New Font · Locationscout has a beautiful modern font now with tons of smaller optimizations to improve the readability and bolder headlines to make sections easier to recognize.
August 2021
contributed by:
Manuel
- Download Area · Locationscout is all about finding beautiful spots to take photos, but it's also really important to me that you won't only find these beautiful places but also get your own best possible photo. That's why the platform has a Learn Section which got extended by a Download Area now with 2 initial high-quality Lightroom preset packages.
- Newsletter Redesign · The monthly newsletter received a full redesign with less text and more focus around beautiful photos from the community and helpful content from the Learn Section.
What's improved
- The entire Learn Section has a new beautiful dark design to match the videos while giving the content itself more focus.
- Learn entries now have a subtle slide effect when hovering them to show the author and give the photos more space with less text on them.
- The Learn Section is finally looking good on mobile devices.
July 2021
contributed by:
Manuel
- Spots Nearby Feature · The Spots Nearby Feature was already available for Premium users in the app and now it's also available on the website, making planning a trip a lot more convenient because you immediately see spots that you can combine and visit together. Simply click the button in the top left on the map within each spot to enable the feature and select a spot to calculate walking time and see the shortest route.
What's improved
- Spots now have a bigger map.
June 2021
contributed by:
Bianka
·
Manuel
- 50+ Location Guides · This month is more about content and therefore there are over 50 new high quality Location Guides within popular locations like Hawaii, Florida, The Hague and many more. You can find the entire list in our Location Section. All of this wouldn't have been possible without Bianka, who wrote most of these texts and did a fantastic job researching and gathering all the information needed to visit these places.
May 2021
- Verified Profiles · We are 62.000+ travelers and photographers already, so it's definitely time to give more of you a chance to highlight your beautiful galleries with features like the new verified profiles. Verified profiles are indicated by a small check behind the name in spots, comments, the feed, and in the profile.
- Profile Tooltips · A new profile tooltip is shown when you hover profile images in the feed or below spot images to get more details about this photographer immediately.
What's released
April 2021
contributed by:
Manuel
- Licensing · Nowadays, stock-image platforms are taking up to 85% of the revenue while forcing the photographers to fixed prices which result in earnings of less than 10 Cents per image sold. I am a photographer myself and as the founder / solo developer of this platform, I simply can't accept the status quo. That's why I am introducing a new license feature this month. Earn money via Locationscout by offering your photos for licensing. No middleman fee, 100% your revenue. Learn more
March 2021
- Weather · One of the most important factors for a great landscape photo is now shown within each spot around the world in real-time. Learn more
What's improved
- Stephan and I did improve the page speed again by around 10-15%.
- For all our friends from the United States, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Cayman Islands, Liberia, the Bahamas, and Belize, I made sure to set the temperature to Fahrenheit for the new weather feature, which can be changed in the profile settings at any time.
What's released
February 2021
- Big Performance Upgrade · We tripled our server infrastructure with an entirely new basis to reach faster loading times (up to 3x more speed) and scale limitlessly.
What's improved
- We invested a lot of time to improve pages that became slow because of more and more data like the home feed, which is now up to 10x (!!) faster than before due to lots of performance improvements on how data is loaded.
What's released
January 2021
contributed by:
Manuel
- Learn Section · I've launched the new Learn Section, which is basically like Amazon Prime Video for travelers and photographers with growing high-quality video content added on top to each premium subscription.
What's released
Support further development
Thank you for every Premium Subscriber for your financial support, making all these improvements possible in the first place. Everything before January 2021 and all the small daily improvements aren't listed because that would go beyond the scope.
Founder of Locationscout
