Capture a photo

Help guide · Updated June 25, 2026

What this is. Photos in Campound are geolocated — every shot you take or import gets pinned to the map at the spot it was captured. Tap the cluster to flip through them in a carousel. Originals stay on your device at full resolution; thumbnails drive the map markers. No account required.

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←Map tools

The two entry points

Both photo tools live in the Map tools sidebar — turn it on from the More menu first, then look at the bottom group of icons.

Vertical Map tools toolbar on the left edge of the map with the camera and library-import icons at the bottom. — Camera and library-import icons sit at the bottom of the Map tools sidebar.

Tool	What it does
Take photo	Opens the system camera. The shot is tagged with your current GPS location.
Add photo from library	Opens the system file picker. If the photo has GPS EXIF metadata, that location is used; otherwise the photo lands at the center of the current map view.

Both tools go through the system file picker, which means Campound never asks for full Photo Library access — only the one photo you explicitly select. The camera does need the standard one-time camera permission.

How a photo gets stored

When you capture or import, the app keeps two copies:

Thumbnail — a 320 × 320 square JPEG with a baked white border. Lives in local storage. Small enough to keep many of them around; what shows on the map and in the carousel.
Full-resolution original — the unmodified bytes (HEIC, JPEG, PNG, whatever the source was). Lives in the app's private Filesystem at photos/<id>.<ext>. Loaded on demand when you open a photo in the carousel and want to see it at full quality.

Both stay on your device. Photos don't sync to your account today — that's tracked as a planned feature; for now what you capture is yours, on this device.

How photos appear on the map

Turn on the My photos layer (in the Layers menu) to see them. Each photo becomes a tappable marker showing its thumbnail. When photos are close together, the marker collapses into a numbered cluster; zoom in and clusters split apart.

Map showing a blue cluster badge with the number 4 (four photos collapsed into a cluster) and a separate solo photo marker showing its thumbnail. — Four photos clustered together as a blue numbered badge; the lone fifth photo to the left shows its thumbnail directly as a marker.

The carousel

Tap any photo marker — solo or cluster — to open the carousel. It opens with the thumbnail instantly, then quietly loads the full-resolution original in the background and swaps it in. Swipe left and right (or use the chevrons) to flip through photos in the same group. Tapping a cluster opens the carousel with all the photos in that cluster.

What's in the carousel:

The photo itself, laid out for whatever aspect ratio you shot at.
A per-slide delete button — removes the thumbnail from local storage, deletes the full-resolution original from the Filesystem, and refreshes the map layer.
Position indicator showing which slide you're on (1 of 4, etc.).

Co-located photos never separate. If you took a flurry of shots at the same spot, they'll cluster at every zoom level. Tap the cluster to scroll through them in the carousel — the map won't zoom in trying to split them.

Working with imported photos (.campound bundles)

If a friend sends you a .campound archive, the photos inside become part of your map — visible alongside your own captures with the same thumbnail markers. Bundled photos are flagged separately:

They never upload to your account (they're not yours to claim).
They can be filtered or hidden as a group via the My photos → Filter bundles panel in the Layers menu.
You can fork one into your own dataset (copy the full-res into your own Filesystem path and re-tag it without the bundle marker) using the "Copy to my data" action — useful when you want to keep editing or re-export it as your own.

Tips

No Photo Library permission needed. Both tools go through the system file picker, which only hands the app the files you explicitly select. You'll never see a "Campound wants full access to your photos" prompt.

HEIC is fine on iOS, iffy elsewhere. iPhone shots in HEIC display correctly inside Campound on iOS. If you import an HEIC on the web or Android the thumbnail still works but the full-res viewer might fall back to a placeholder. Re-encode to JPEG on capture if you'll be viewing across platforms.

Library imports without GPS land at map center. If the file has no GPS EXIF (most desktop downloads lose it; some apps strip it for privacy), the photo gets pinned to wherever the map is centered when you imported it. So pan to roughly the right area first.

Delete is local-only today. Removing a photo deletes it from this device. Since server sync isn't running, there's nothing else to clean up — but if you import the same bundle again later, deleted bundle photos won't come back automatically (they're tracked as removed).