Terms of use

Journeo is a place to turn your photographs into a published travel story. These terms are the agreement between you and us about using it. By creating an account or publishing anything here, you accept them. If you do not, the right move is not to use the service.

They are written to be read. Where a clause is about something the software actually does, it says what the software does, and you can check.

You sign in with an email address and a password, with a one-time link sent to that address, or with Google. Whichever you use, the address on the account has to be one you can actually receive mail at — it is how a password is reset and how a change of address is confirmed.

Keep your sign-in details to yourself. Anything done from your account is treated as done by you. You choose a public handle when you join; it appears in the address of everything you publish, and it may not be one that impersonates Journeo, its staff, or another person.

You keep every right you already had in your photographs, your words and anything else you upload. Uploading to Journeo does not transfer copyright and does not make the work ours.

What you do give us is a licence to run the service with it. It is non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free and revocable, and it covers exactly four things and nothing beyond them:

• Storing the files you upload, with our image host, so that there is something to serve.
• Making the derivative copies a web page needs — resizing, re-encoding for whichever browser asked, cropping to a thumbnail for a profile grid or a link preview, and generating the tiny blurred placeholder that holds a photograph’s space while it loads.
• Caching those copies, on our servers, at the content delivery network in front of them, and in the browsers of people who read your work, so that a page opens quickly.
• Displaying your published journeys to the people who visit them, together with the title, cover and excerpt that make a shared link render as something other than a bare URL.

Worldwide and royalty-free because serving a web page anywhere in the world at no charge to you is what the licence is for. Non-exclusive because it is yours to license to anybody else at the same time, including a publisher, a client or a competing service, and you need no permission from us to do it. And limited to the four purposes above: we do not sell your work, sub-license it, syndicate it, put advertising against it, or use it to train machine-learning models.

Revocable is the word that matters most, and it is revocable by the ordinary controls rather than by writing to anybody. Make a journey private and we stop displaying it, including the copy cached at the edge. Delete a photograph, a moment or a journey and the licence over it ends with it. Close your account and everything you own is withdrawn immediately, with erasure following as described in the privacy notice. The only copies that may survive a withdrawal are the ordinary technical ones — database backups, and images already sitting in a reader’s browser or a CDN — which age out on their own schedule and are not served as your journey.

You are telling us, by uploading, that the work is yours to upload: that you took the photographs or have permission to use them, and that publishing them here breaks nobody else’s rights.

A travel photograph usually contains strangers, and sometimes contains friends who did not expect to be published. Think before you press publish. Faces, house numbers, number plates, a screenshot of a boarding pass — a journey is a public web page with a permanent address, and it will be read by people you did not send it to.

The same goes for coordinates. Photographs carry the location they were taken at, and Journeo draws those locations on a map. A journey that begins at your own front door will show your own front door.

If someone asks you to take a photograph of them down, take it down. If a photograph of you has been published here by somebody else, the notice routes are on the contact page.

Journeo will write a first draft for you: a working title for the journey, and a title and a short narrative for each moment. It writes from the facts your photographs carry — when each moment happened, where, how many frames it holds, and whatever you have already typed. Your photographs themselves are not sent to the model, and it is instructed to leave a field empty rather than invent a detail it cannot support.

It is a draft, and the draft is the point. Every sentence lands in the same editable field you would have typed into. Nothing it writes is published by pressing the button that writes it; publishing remains a separate act that only you perform.

Which settles the question of responsibility. Once you publish, the words are yours — you are the author of your journey for the purposes of these terms, the acceptable-use clause below, and any complaint anybody makes about it. “The AI wrote it” is not a defence, because you read it, kept it and published it. Read what it wrote before you do.

Two things we will not pretend about a language model. It can be wrong: a plausible sentence about a place is not a checked one, and the instructions it runs under reduce that risk rather than removing it. And it is not deterministic — the same journey drafted twice will not produce the same prose, so a draft you liked and replaced does not come back.

Drafting is metered in credits. A draft costs 3 credits for the journey title and 5 for each moment, the price is shown with your balance beside it before the button that spends anything, and you are charged for what was saved rather than 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 costs nothing.

Credits are not money. They are a unit of account inside this service, they are not a currency, a deposit, a stored-value instrument or property, they carry no cash value, and they cannot be transferred, sold, exchanged or withdrawn. Every account is granted a starting balance when it is created; today that is the only way credits come into existence, because there is no way to buy them. Nothing here is a promise that there never will be.

Because they are not bought, they are not refunded in money — there is no money to refund. What we do instead is return them: credits held for a draft that fails, or for a moment that could not be saved, go back to your balance, and where a fault of ours consumed credits and produced nothing we will put them back. A balance is not guaranteed to survive a change to how drafting is priced, and it does not survive the closing of your account.

Spending credits does not buy exclusivity or a promise of quality. It buys a run of the model as it stands that day.

Do not use Journeo to publish or do any of the following.

• Work that is not yours to publish, or that infringes someone else’s copyright, trademark or privacy.
• Sexual content involving children, or any image made to sexualise a child. There is no threshold and no appeal on this one.
• Content that harasses, threatens or incites violence against a person or a group, or that exists to humiliate somebody.
• Material that is unlawful where it is published, or that promotes an unlawful act.
• Deception — impersonating another person, passing off someone else’s journey as your own, or misrepresenting where or when a photograph was taken in order to mislead.
• Spam, bulk automated posting, or using a journey as a vehicle for unrelated advertising.
• Publishing somebody else’s private information — a home address, a workplace, a phone number, a document, a face in a context they would not choose — whether it arrived in a caption, in a photograph, or in the coordinates attached to one.
• Attacks on the service itself: probing or circumventing access controls, reading or writing data belonging to another account, uploading malware, scraping at a volume that degrades the site, or reselling access to it.
• Abusing the drafting feature: automating it, running it to extract the instructions the model works under, or writing text into a journey designed to be read by the model as an instruction rather than as part of your story.
• Creating accounts to evade a suspension, or holding handles you do not use in order to keep them from other people.

The AI Story Director is bound by the same rules as everything else here. It writes a draft; you decide what is published, and you are responsible for it once you do.

These are the rules whether a journey is published or sitting in your drafts. A private draft is not readable by other people and is still hosted on our infrastructure, and the first item on the list above admits of no private version.

Start with what does not happen, because it is the part people assume. Uploads are not screened. No automatic classifier looks at your photographs before they are stored, no person reviews a journey before it is published, and nothing waits in a queue for approval. A journey is live the moment you publish it. Moderation here is something that happens afterwards, when a problem is brought to our attention.

When it is, what we can do is graduated. We can hide a comment, take a single journey out of public view, or remove content that breaks the clauses above. Where the account itself is the problem we can suspend it: a suspended account is signed out of every device, is refused entry to the application, and — this is the part worth understanding — is treated as anonymous by the database itself, so it cannot read or write anything of its own or anybody else’s while the suspension holds. A suspension is recorded either as open-ended or with a date it is meant to run until. Lifting one is a deliberate act by us; the date is a commitment about when we will do it, not a timer that does it for us, and we would rather describe it that way than have you count days against something automatic.

Suspension does not delete your work. Your journeys become unreadable and remain in place. If a suspension is lifted, they are still there.

Where it is possible and safe, we will tell you what rule was broken and give you a chance to put it right. For sexual content involving children, for credible threats, and where the law requires it, we will not, and there is no appeal on the first of those.

Two honest limitations, since a moderation clause that overstates its own machinery is worse than none. There is no report button in the product yet, so if something here needs a moderator’s attention the routes that exist are on the contact page, which is candid about how few of them there currently are. And moderation is carried out by hand: the internal view a moderator uses is a list to read, not a set of buttons, so anything above happens because a person decided it and did it, not because a system detected it.

The rule that governs it is in the clause above about your work: nobody may upload a photograph that is not theirs to upload. If somebody has, or if a journey here infringes your copyright, your trademark or your privacy, we will act on a notice.

A notice needs to contain enough for somebody to act on it without guessing:

• The address of the journey, and which photograph or passage within it.
• What the work is and why it is yours — where it was first published, or how else the claim can be checked.
• Whether you are the rights holder or acting for one, and how to reach you for a reply.
• A statement that the use was not authorised by you or by law.

The same applies if the complaint is about you rather than your work — a photograph of you, or of your home, published by somebody who had no right to. Ask the person who published it first if you reasonably can; a request to take a photograph down is one every traveller here is asked to honour.

Now the gap, stated rather than buried. This deployment has no published address to send a notice to, and no named agent to receive one — the contact page says so plainly rather than printing an address nobody reads, and it is where an address will appear the day there is one. Until then the honest advice is to keep your evidence and check that page. This is a known deficiency in these terms and not a position we are defending.

We will run the service with reasonable care, and we will not make your published journeys private, alter your words or delete your photographs except as described in these terms or where the law requires it.

What we cannot promise is that the service is faultless or always available. It is early software: there will be outages, features will change, and some of them will be removed. There is no uptime commitment here, no support response time, and no service credit, because promising any of the three would be inventing an obligation this deployment has no way to meet.

Keep your own copies of your photographs. Journeo is a place to publish them, not a backup of them, and it should not be the only place a photograph exists. There is no export yet, which makes that sentence a practical instruction rather than a disclaimer.

The service depends on other companies — an authentication and database provider, an image host, a hosting platform and a model provider — and is named as such in the privacy notice. When one of them is unavailable, so is the part of Journeo that needs it: sign-in can fail, uploads can fail, drafting can fail. We choose them and we are answerable for that choice; we do not control them.

So, to the extent the law allows: the service is provided as it is and as it is available, without warranties of any kind beyond those that cannot lawfully be excluded, and specifically without any warranty that it will be uninterrupted, secure, error-free, or fit for any particular purpose you have in mind for it. We do not warrant that anything the Story Director writes is accurate.

To the extent the law allows, and subject to the paragraph that ends this clause, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill or opportunity, or for the loss or corruption of data or content — including photographs, narrative or a draft that failed to save. That last one is the reason the drafting panel prints text it could not store rather than discarding it: the practical answer to this risk is to keep your own copies, and the product is built to make that possible rather than to rely on the clause.

Nor are we liable for what other people publish here. A journey is written by its author, not by us; we host it, and hosting it is not endorsing it.

Journeo is provided to you at no charge and there is nothing to refund, so where a cap on our total liability is permitted, it is a nominal one. The reviewing lawyer must set the figure and the jurisdiction it applies in; this draft deliberately does not invent a number.

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that may not lawfully be limited or excluded. Where you deal with us as a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected by anything on this page.

You can stop at any time, and you do not have to ask. Making a journey private withdraws it on its own. Deleting a journey removes it and keeps your photographs. Requesting deletion from your account settings withdraws every journey you own the moment the request goes through, and starts a thirty-day window in which you can change your mind before anything is erased — with the caveats about what erasure actually means today set out in the privacy notice, which you should read before relying on it. Cancelling inside the window stops the erasure and leaves your journeys private; republishing them is a separate, deliberate act.

We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms — most often for the clauses above about content and about attacks on the service — and the mechanics of a suspension are described in §08. Where it is possible and safe to do so we will say why and give you a chance to put it right; for the most serious categories, and where the law requires it, we will not.

We can also stop offering the service, or stop offering a part of it. If we shut Journeo down we will give reasonable notice before published journeys stop being served, so that there is time to take copies. That is a commitment about notice, not an undertaking to run the service forever.

Ending the agreement does not undo what already happened. The clauses about your ownership of your work, about liability, about content you published while it was live, and about credits carrying no cash value all continue to apply after either side ends this.

These terms will change as the product does — this page describes software that is being built, and several clauses above name a gap that closing will require rewriting them. The date at the top is when they last changed.

For a change that meaningfully affects your rights we will give notice before it takes effect rather than swapping the page quietly. Continuing to use Journeo after that is how you accept it, and closing your account is how you do not. Corrections that do not affect your rights — a clearer sentence, a fixed reference, a caveat that is no longer true because the gap it described has been closed — are made without notice, and the date is still moved.

There is no archive of previous versions yet. Until there is, the date at the top is the only version marker on this page, which is worth knowing if you ever need to establish what these terms said on a particular day.