The questions people actually ask.

Sign in, then choose New journey. The only thing you have to supply is a name — usually a place. City, country and dates are offered on the same form and every one of them is optional, because the photographs you are about to add already carry that information.

The next screen is the Builder. Drop your photographs in, press Arrange into moments, and you have a draft you can edit. It is a private draft until you publish it, so there is no cost to starting one you are not sure about.

A moment is one stop in the story: a handful of photographs taken near each other in time and place, under a title and a short narrative. A journey is an ordered run of them, and the map at the end is drawn through them in that order.

Arrange into moments proposes the grouping for you, and the rule is deliberately simple enough to predict rather than clever enough to surprise. Two consecutive photographs begin a new moment when more than ninety minutes passed between them, or when they were taken more than 250 metres apart. Photographs with no capture time in the file — screenshots, downloads, anything stripped of its metadata — are appended at the end in filename order rather than sorted to the front, so a journey never opens on a screenshot.

One warning worth reading twice: Arrange into moments replaces the moments that are already there. It deletes them and builds the arrangement again from the photographs. If you have written or drafted narrative, pressing it a second time loses that writing. Add the photographs first, arrange once, then write.

The Reader knows eleven shapes a moment can take — a single full-bleed frame, a diptych, a triptych, an overheard line, a silent moving image, an ambience card, a notebook, a pair of large figures, a map plate, a closing frame and a closing ledger. The Builder has no chooser for them yet, so every moment you create is the single-frame shape. The others render correctly when a journey carries them; there is simply no way to pick one from the Builder today.

JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC, HEIF and GIF. HEIC straight off an iPhone is fine and does not need converting first. Each file may be up to 25 MB. There is no limit on how many you drop at once — they are split into batches for you, three uploading at a time, so a folder of sixty is an ordinary thing to hand over.

Upload the originals. The files go directly from your browser to our image host rather than through our servers, and the versions readers see are resized from the original on the way out, so a smaller file bought you nothing and cost you detail.

Capture time and location are read twice. Your own browser reads them out of the file before it is sent, which is quick and works for JPEG; the image host reads them again from the uploaded file, and its answer wins where the two disagree. That second read is why HEIC works at all — no browser here parses HEIC metadata, so an iPhone photograph arrives with its time and place only because the host extracted them server-side. It is also why a HEIC can briefly show the wrong pixel dimensions between the upload starting and finishing.

If one file fails, only that one fails. The rest of the batch is saved and you can drop the failure in again without starting over.

Uploading happens in three steps: Journeo reserves a row and signs a short-lived permission slip, your browser sends the bytes straight to the image host, and then it reports back what the host said so the row can be completed. A photograph shows as pending when the first step happened and the last one did not — the tab was closed mid-upload, the connection went, or the host refused the file. Pending photographs are skipped when moments are arranged, which is why one can seem to vanish from a batch that otherwise worked.

It is worth being plain about the word: pending here means the upload did not finish, not that a person is reviewing your photograph. There is no moderation queue on this deployment and no automatic image screening. Nothing is held back waiting for approval, and nothing is examined before it is shown.

The fix is almost always to drop the file in again. Nothing resumes on its own — there is no background retry — so a batch abandoned halfway has to be started over rather than waited on.

A photograph is removed from your library in Media. One that is still placed in a moment is refused, and the refusal tells you how many moments it is in. That is on purpose rather than an obstacle: the placement would be cascaded away with the photograph, so a frame would silently disappear from a story you had already published with nothing left to explain the gap. Take it out of the moment first, then remove it.

Deleting a journey is in the Builder and is a real delete — the journey, its moments and the arrangement of photographs within them all go. Your photographs do not. They return to the library, unattached, ready for another story. Deleting a journey is a statement about the story, not a request to destroy the negatives.

One honest limit. Removing a photograph removes our record of it; the file itself stays with the image host, because destroying it needs a separate signed call that this deployment does not make yet. Nothing links to it any more and it will not appear anywhere, but it has not been erased from the internet, and we would rather say that than imply otherwise.

It writes the first draft, so that what you are doing is editing rather than starting: a working title for the journey, and a title and a two-to-four sentence narrative for each moment. Everything it writes lands in exactly the fields you would have typed into, and you can change or delete any of it. Nothing it writes is published behind your back, because publishing is still a separate button that only you press.

It has not seen your photographs. Your images are never sent to the model — the request is built from text facts alone: when each moment happened and in what timezone, its coordinates to four decimal places, the place name if one was resolved, how many photographs it holds, how long the gap since the previous moment was, and whatever title or subtitle you have already typed. It is instructed to write only from that evidence, to leave a field empty rather than invent a detail, and never to describe a person.

It drafts up to twenty-four moments in one run and refuses more, because a longer run risks being cut off mid-answer after the credits are spent. By default it only fills moments that have no words yet; replacing moments you have already written is a checkbox you have to tick.

Runs can land partially. If six of eight moments save, the panel says so, names the two that did not, and prints their text on screen — at that point the panel is holding the only copy, so copy it out before leaving the page.

Credits are the unit the Story Director is priced in. A draft costs 3 credits for the journey title suggestion and 5 for each moment, so drafting eight moments is quoted at up to 43. The price is shown, with your balance beside it, before the button that spends anything — the first click opens the panel, the second is the one that costs.

“Up to” is doing real work in that sentence. You are charged for what was saved, not for what was asked. A run that writes six of eight moments costs six moments’ worth and the rest returns to your balance, a run that fails entirely costs nothing, and a run whose answer comes back in a shape Journeo cannot use costs nothing either.

Every account is granted 100 credits when it is created, which is enough for a journey of nineteen moments. There is no way to buy more on this deployment — no payment path exists anywhere in the product — so when a balance runs out, the moments left have to be written by hand. Your balance and every movement in it, grant and charge alike, are listed in Credits under your account.

The journey’s title, subtitle, city, country and dates. Each moment’s title and narrative. Each photograph’s caption and its alt text — the description read aloud to somebody who cannot see the image — set per placement, so the same photograph can mean something different in two journeys. The cover image, which is what appears on your profile and in link previews. And the capture kit: the camera, lens, film stock, ISO, what you edited in, how you travelled and what you were listening to.

Two things are not editable in the Builder yet, and it is better to know before you go looking. There is no theme chooser, so every journey created today uses The Slow Atlas. And a moment’s coordinates cannot be edited or cleared — see the answer on location below for what to do instead.

Renaming a journey does not change its address. The slug is derived once, when the journey is created, precisely so that a title fixed three months later does not break every link you have already sent.

A journey is created private and stays private until you press Publish. You need at least one moment before the button will do anything. Publishing makes the journey readable by anyone who has the link, lists it on your public profile page, and gives it a permanent address of the form journeo.life/your-handle/the-trip, which the Builder shows you as a link the moment it is live.

Make private is the way back, and it is a real one. It returns the journey to a draft, and it also clears the copy cached at the edge — so the story stops being readable at once rather than minutes later. Use it without hesitating if a photograph turns out to show a face or an address it should not.

Drafts are visible to you and to nobody else. They appear on your own chart on the front page, marked as drafts, and they are excluded from every list anyone else sees.

From your photographs. Almost every phone and many cameras write the coordinates of each frame into the file itself, and those coordinates are read out and stored against the photograph. A moment’s position is the average of the coordinates of the photographs in it, and the route is a line drawn through the moments in order. A journey with fewer than two placed moments gets no map at all, because a single point is a location rather than a route.

Two ordinary reasons a pin lands somewhere odd. The first is that averaging is honest arithmetic and not always the answer you wanted: a moment holding photographs from two ends of a street sits in the middle of the street, and one stray frame from the wrong side of a city drags the whole moment towards it. The second is that a phone with a poor fix writes a poor coordinate, and nothing here corrects it — what your camera recorded is what is drawn.

The blunt one, which matters more than either: a journey that begins with a photograph taken in your kitchen will publish the location of your kitchen. Look at the map before you publish. It is not a bug and nothing can guess which frames you meant.

There is no way to edit or clear a moment’s coordinates in the Builder yet. That is a real gap and worth saying before you go hunting for a control that is not there. What you can do today works, and works immediately.

Delete the moment. That removes its point from the route and its photographs from the story, and the photographs themselves stay in your library. If the offending location is the whole first stop of a trip — the house you left from — deleting that moment is usually exactly the edit you wanted anyway.

Or keep the frame out of the journey in the first place. Coordinates are read when a photograph is uploaded, so the reliable way to publish nothing about where you live is not to upload the photographs taken there. Failing all of that, Make private withdraws the whole journey at once, including from the copy cached at the edge, and gives you time to think.

It is off. It is always off, on every page and every visit, until you press the Ambience control yourself — there is no code path that starts audio without a click, and nothing remembers that you turned it on last time. Press it again and it fades out.

What you hear is not a recording. It is filtered noise generated in your own browser and shaped by a handful of numbers stored with the journey — a slow oscillation across the filter is what makes it breathe like weather rather than sit there like a fan. No audio file is downloaded and nothing is streamed.

The control appears only on journeys that carry those settings, and nothing in the Builder writes them, so you cannot yet add ambience to a journey of your own. On journeys that have none, the switch is absent rather than present and inert.

Yes. Light, Dark or System, in your account settings. The choice is stored in your own browser rather than on your account, deliberately: appearance is a property of the screen you are reading on, and the same person wants dark on a laptop at night and light on a phone in daylight. It never leaves your machine, and a browser you have not set it in starts dark.

It changes the chrome around a story, not the story. A published journey carries its own art direction — palette, typefaces, spacing — and repainting it because a reader prefers light would overrule the choice its author made. Journeys read as they were written.

A skip link is the first thing focus reaches on every page and jumps straight to the content. Interactive controls are real buttons and links, so they take focus in reading order and answer to Enter and Space, and focus is drawn with a visible ring rather than removed. The progress rail down the side of a journey is an ordered list that costs exactly one Tab stop: tab into it once and the arrow keys move between moments, rather than fourteen stops standing between you and the rest of the page. Each announces itself as “moment three of fourteen” with its title, and the one you are reading is marked as current. Purely decorative pieces — the equaliser bars on the ambience switch, ornamental rules, the hover label beside the rail — are hidden from assistive technology instead of read out as noise.

Photographs use the alt text their author wrote. Journeo cannot supply one for you, so a photograph left without alt text is presented as decorative, which for a travel story is a real loss to the reader. Writing it is the single most useful minute you can spend on a journey before publishing.

If you have asked your operating system to reduce motion, that is honoured throughout: entrances become a plain fade, photographs hold one undistorted frame instead of drifting, routes and rules draw themselves already finished, and the ambience meter stands still while staying legible as a meter. Nothing is hidden to achieve it.

A like is a public count on somebody’s journey and notifies its author. A bookmark is yours: it saves a journey to your own Bookmarks page and tells nobody. Both are one press, both toggle off again, and both need an account — the controls are shown to everyone and ask you to sign in only when pressed, because the published page is generated once and served to everybody the same way.

Collections are named sets of journeys you assemble yourself, including other people’s. A collection can hold a journey only if you can already read it, so a private draft cannot be smuggled into one to make it visible. They are for your own organisation today: there is no public page for a collection yet, so nobody else can browse one.

Comments sit at the foot of a published journey and can be switched off per journey by its owner. One caveat we would rather state than have you discover: removing a comment you posted currently fails. The control is there, the write is refused, and the comment stays. It is a defect, not a policy.

The relationship is recorded, both of your follower counts move, and the person you followed gets a notification. You cannot follow yourself, and the control simply does not appear on your own profile rather than offering something that would be refused.

What it does not do yet is change what you are shown. There is no following feed and nothing anywhere is filtered or ordered by who you follow, so following is at present a way of saying so rather than a way of reading. Unfollowing is the same button again.

Three things: somebody likes one of your journeys, somebody follows you, or somebody comments on one of your journeys. They appear in Notifications under your account and can be marked read individually or all at once.

They are written by the database itself at the moment the like, follow or comment happens, which is why nothing can forge one in your inbox: no account has permission to write to that list, and the recipient is derived from the event rather than chosen by whoever caused it. You are never notified about your own actions.

Two limits. They are in-app only — no email is sent for any of them — and there is no preferences screen yet, so which kinds you receive cannot currently be changed from the interface. And a notification is a courtesy that is not allowed to break the thing it describes, so on the rare occasion one cannot be written, the like or the comment still lands and the notice is the only thing lost.

In Settings. A handle is three to thirty characters, lower-case letters, numbers and underscores, starting and ending with a letter or a number. Some are reserved because they collide with parts of the site or would let someone pass for staff.

Changing it does not break the links you have already shared. Your old handle is kept and every address under it redirects permanently to the new one — which also means a handle you have retired stays yours and cannot be claimed by somebody else. Your journeys keep their own slugs; only the part before the slash moves.

In Settings, under sign-in. Nothing changes the moment you submit it: a confirmation is sent to the new address, and the account only moves when you follow the link in it. Until then you carry on signing in with your current address. That round trip is the whole security property — without it, anyone who borrowed your session for five minutes could point your account at an address they controlled and lock you out of it permanently.

If the new address cannot be used, the form says only that, and deliberately does not say why. Reporting “that address is already registered” would turn the form into a way of testing whether any given person has an account here.

In Settings, at the bottom. You confirm by typing your handle, because this is not a decision that should survive a mis-click. The instant the request goes through, every journey you own is withdrawn — back to draft, back to private — so nothing of yours is readable from that moment on. Your other devices are signed out; the session you are using stays, so that you can change your mind.

Erasure falls due thirty days later, and you can cancel at any point inside that window. Cancelling stops the erasure but does not republish anything: your journeys stay private and you republish the ones you want back. That is deliberate — the likeliest reason somebody cancels inside the window is that the request was not theirs in the first place, which is the worst possible moment to hand a session a button that also puts everything back on the open web.

Now the part most services leave out. Nothing on this deployment runs the erasure on the due date. The routine that erases an account exists, is written and is tested, and there is no scheduler wired up to call it — so the date you are shown is the earliest your data can be erased, not a promise of the hour it happens. In practice your account is withdrawn from public view immediately and the erasure itself is carried out on request. We would rather say that than print a date we cannot keep.

Two smaller things in the same spirit. Your profile page stays reachable until erasure — it is the account, not the journeys, and keeping it alive is what makes cancelling possible at all. And there is no machine-readable export of your data yet, so if you want copies of your photographs, keep your originals.

You do. You keep the copyright in your photographs and your writing. What you grant Journeo is a licence to store, resize and display them for the purpose of running the service and showing your journeys to the people you published them for. Nothing wider: we do not sell your work, license it onward, or use it to train models.

That licence ends when the work does. Make a journey private and it stops being shown; close your account and everything is withdrawn immediately, with erasure following as described above. The full wording is in the terms, and what is stored and where is set out in the privacy notice.