Viewpoint

Last updated 2026-06-04

Sharing a spot publicly

Every spot you capture in Viewpoint is private to your account by default. You can choose to publish a spot so other Viewpoint users can see it on the public map — and you can make it private again at any time.

This page covers exactly what becomes visible when you publish, what stays private, and the wildlife-protection safeguard that blocks sensitive locations from being shared at all.

The default — every spot is private

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

Sharing is an account feature: both publishing your own spots and browsing others’ on the public map require signing in. As a guest your spots are simply local and private — there’s nothing to publish and no public feed to browse until you choose to sign in.

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 creator identity is shown so other users can see who contributed it.

What stays private even after publishing

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.

Browsing other people’s public spots

When you pan around the Map tab you’ll see two kinds of pins:

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, doesn’t notify the creator, and is fully reversible from Settings → Hidden spots. See How Viewpoint moderates uploaded photos for the full moderation picture.

A few practical notes

Some scouts have asked whether Viewpoint will ever let local pros sell curated map collections. The answer is yes, but not inside the iOS app — when that surface ships it will live on a separate Viewpoint web product, where you’ll browse, preview, and purchase maps from your laptop or phone browser. Once you’ve bought a map on the web, it’ll sync into your iOS library automatically and work offline like every other spot you’ve captured.

Why split it like that? Two reasons. First, multi-creator marketplaces involve splitting each sale between the platform and the creator, plus tax + identity handling for each creator — Apple’s in-app purchase system isn’t designed for that, but Stripe Connect (what the web product will use) is. Second, it lets creators set their own prices in real currency amounts, instead of being locked to the App Store’s fixed price tiers, so the cost of a map matches the work that went into it.

The iOS app stays a clean utility: capture, plan, browse free public spots, and view anything you’ve added to your library. There are no Buy buttons or price tags in the app, and there won’t be — that whole side of the experience belongs on the web product when it launches.