Places (beta)

Beta

The places domain sits behind the instance beta switch, which is off by default. With the switch off, /places goes home, the Places tab and its statistics are not offered, and the module toggle is hidden. Data recorded while the switch was on is untouched by turning it off. See Beta features for what “beta” means here and why this domain is still behind it.

A place is a point of interest — a museum, a summit, a restaurant, a world heritage site — that you have been to, plan to go to, or wish to. It is a first-class entry with its own list, detail page, form and map layer. A visit is one dated occasion at that place, with photographs and a caption as proof. A trip is a view of places rather than their owner, so “every McDonald’s I have been to” is expressible, and the same place on two trips is one entry with two visits.

Status

A place is visited, planned or on the wishlist. Planned is derived from a dated future visit, never stored. Ticking a place off a checklist records that you have been there without claiming a date — deliberately — and the page says “visited” without pretending to a visit count it does not have.

Adding a place

• Pick it on the map. The ”+” menu on the map offers Add place; the form opens and stays on the map after a save so you see the pin. The location input is the shared picker — search, click, drag — and dropping a pin lists the named places around it.
• From a photograph. A trip with a linked Immich album is a list of dated, positioned points. A geotagged photo suggests the place it was taken at, within one kilometre, and outranks a hotel or a logged place as the reason — a photograph is a GPS fix at the moment the shutter opened.
• Tick a checklist entry. A catalogue target becomes a real place only when you tick it. Ticking never happens by itself: the suggestion logic proposes and you confirm, because a wrongly set tick is indistinguishable from a real one afterwards.
• Import a list — see below.

A place added by hand carries the same identity a later import would mint, so the Colosseum picked today and imported next month is one place, not two. New places fill in address, city and country from the pin when saved; a pin in no settlement still names the district or the state it lies in.

Lists you build

Group places into named lists — a wishlist, a route, “the ones worth the detour” — and reorder them by hand. A list has a colour and may wear a symbol, picked from an emoji picker with search (typing “pommes” finds the fries; the emoji database is served by your own instance, so it works offline). A list can ask for its places to be labelled with that symbol on the map instead of their names: fifty- eight McDonald’s spelled out fifty-eight times is noise, one symbol fifty-eight times is a list. Above all of it the map has a switch — as each list says, always names, always symbols.

The places list can be filtered by list, beside status, category and country. A list with no entries shows nothing rather than everything.

Curated checklists

Alongside your own lists come checklists TravStats ships, each verified rather than recalled:

• The UNESCO World Heritage List, complete (1,247 sites)
• The UNESCO Biosphere Reserves — 646 of roughly 759; the register entries with no coordinate are dropped rather than pinned at 0/0, and the gap is stated
• The New 7 Wonders and the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
• The New 7 Wonders of Nature — a natural wonder gets an arrival point, never the centroid of a rainforest
• The national parks of Germany (16) and of the United States (63)
• Fourteen museum warships, with two collector achievements

Subscribing writes one row, not 1,247: a catalogue target becomes a place only when you tick it, so a corrected coordinate still reaches someone who subscribed a release ago. Progress reads “47 / 1,247”, with the real total.

Importing places

Settings → Import offers a CSV import and a Google Maps saved-places import (a Takeout list). German decimals are read as such (“41,8902”). A row with no coordinates — every row of a Takeout export — is neither dropped nor written: it comes back as needs input, with your note intact, for one click in the picker. Each Google row carries Google’s own id, so a second import recognises what is already there. Such a list holds no dates and no prices, and the import says so. The batch appears in the import log and can be undone.

The routes (POST /place-import/preview and /commit) are live for the API and the Companion app; the web import panel for places stays behind the beta switch with the rest of the domain.

On the map and in the statistics

Places are drawn as the same plain dot every other domain uses, including in the legend — filled for visited, hollow for the wishlist, in the list’s colour — with a size slider like every other domain and labels that thin out with zoom. The “All” map resolves colour and symbol through the same step as the Places tab.

The Places tab of the statistics page counts cities, countries and continents, streaks, latitudes and ratings; the country filter lists countries, not spellings. Twenty-five place achievements — cities, continents, streaks, latitudes, ratings, the checklists — take the catalogue past 270. A recorded place proves a country on the visited rung of the passport.

Limits

• Beta. What holds the domain behind the switch is not a missing capability but a built one with no way in yet: the CSV import’s routes exist, and the web surface for the rows that need a decision is what is still to come. Expect the import panel to change.
• No opening hours, no reviews, no routing to a place. TravStats records that you were there.
• Visits import against their place; a visit to a place not yet in your logbook needs the place first.
• Checklists are read-only. You can tick entries and build your own lists; you cannot edit a shipped checklist.