Photographs in, a journey out.

A journey starts with a name and nothing else. City, country and dates are all optional, because every one of them is already sitting in the photographs you are about to drop in.

Drag the folder in. Each file is read in your own browser first — capture time and coordinates come out of its EXIF before a single byte leaves the machine — and then goes straight to storage without passing through our servers. Sixty photographs is an ordinary batch. One corrupt file fails on its own and the other fifty-nine still arrive.

Then press Arrange into moments. Two consecutive photographs start a new moment when more than ninety minutes or more than 250 metres separate them — a rule simple enough that you can predict it, which matters more than a cleverer rule you cannot. Everything it proposes is editable: titles, narrative, per-photograph captions and alt text, the cover, the tags, and the camera and film you used.

Publishing is one deliberate button, and it prints the finished address on screen so you can send it to twelve people without hunting for it. Make private is next to it, and it works — including on the cached copy at the edge.

Formats

JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC, HEIF and GIF

Size

Up to 25 MB per photograph

Batch

Whole folders, split automatically, three uploading at once

Route

Browser straight to storage — the bytes never touch our server

The hardest part of a travel story is the blank field under the first photograph. The Story Director fills it — a working title for the journey, and a title and a short narrative for every moment — so that what you are doing is editing rather than starting.

It writes from evidence and it is told to say so when it has none. What it is given is the shape of your trip: when each moment happened, where, how many frames it holds, and whatever you have already typed. It has not seen the photographs — the images are never sent to the model — so it is instructed never to write as though it has, and to leave a field empty rather than invent a detail to fill it.

Nothing it writes is published behind your back. Every sentence lands in the same editable field you would have typed into, and a journey still has to be published by you. The price is quoted before the button that spends anything, and if part of a run fails to save, the panel prints the text it could not store rather than losing it.

Writes

A journey title, and a title and narrative for each moment

Reads

Times, coordinates, place names and photograph counts

Costs

3 credits for the title, 5 per moment, quoted before you commit

Ceiling

24 moments in a single run

One composite call today, not the multi-stage direction pipeline the design documents describe. It writes well from metadata; it does not yet plan a journey into acts.

A theme is not a colour scheme. It carries the whole reading experience — palette, the display and text faces and how they are paired, the measure, the space between moments, how photographs are framed and scrimmed, and which of the house animations a page is allowed to use.

Four ship in the catalogue and they are deliberately unalike, because a mechanism proved with one theme is not proved at all. The Slow Atlas is dark, warm and serif. Nordic Minimal is cold daylight with no ornament. Apple Editorial is light and neutral. Vintage Journal is parchment, ruled and very slightly rotated. Each is stored alongside a font pairing and a map style it nominates, so choosing one settles all three.

Contrast is a property of the catalogue rather than a thing to check afterwards: every foreground and background pair in it clears 7:1, and every accent clears 3:1 on its own ground.

Default

The Slow Atlas — near-black, bone type, brass rules

Also

Nordic Minimal, Apple Editorial, Vintage Journal

Type

Cormorant Garamond, Karla and Architects Daughter, self-hosted

Applied

As CSS variables on the Reader, per journey

The Reader renders whichever theme a journey is bound to. The Builder does not offer the chooser yet, so every journey created today starts in The Slow Atlas.

The map at the end of a journey is a real basemap with your route on it, not a decorative plate with pins dropped over the top. It is drawn with MapLibre GL over CARTO basemaps built from OpenStreetMap data, and the line runs through your moments in the order you wrote them.

The coastline and the marker come from the same coordinates, so a pin cannot land in the sea. The route takes its colour from the journey theme, and the basemap comes in a dark and a light form so a light journey never opens onto a black map.

It costs nothing until it is looked at. The map library is a large download, so it loads only when the section is about to come into view — a reader who stops halfway never pays for it. A journey with fewer than two placed moments gets no map at all, because a single point is a location rather than a route.

Renderer

MapLibre GL, loaded on demand

Basemaps

CARTO Positron and Dark Matter

Data

OpenStreetMap contributors, credited on every map

Points

Your moments, in order, wherever they carry coordinates