Where your family
actually was.
Most photos never say where they were taken. The Atlas reads the place out of the picture, drops a pin, and gathers every photo that belongs there under it. The birth town nobody could point to. The stretch of beach you kept going back to.
Location Types
- Birthplace
- Residence
- School
- Work
- Visited
- Photos
- One pin for every place your photos landed on
- Open a pin: who is confirmed there, and the years
- A dashed ring means nobody has confirmed it yet
- The line joins one life's chapters in date order
How does a photo end up on the map?
Phossil reads the place out of the picture. A church front, a shopfront sign, a harbor, a hillside: when the analysis recognizes somewhere nameable, that name is looked up on a map and the photo takes those coordinates. Every photo that lands on the same place is gathered under one pin.
A location your family types in outranks the reading, every time. Until somebody does that, a pin drawn from the picture alone carries a dashed ring and says so when you open it. Confirm it once and it settles.
That is why a shoebox with nothing written on the back still fills a map. Nobody has to sit down and enter a hundred addresses first.
What does one pin tell me?
The place, the number of photos gathered there, and who is confirmed in them. The roster names up to five people and then tells you how many more there are, rather than quietly stopping at five.
Underneath sits the span those photos cover, written as a range: 1949 to 1972. When only some of the photos are dated the label says which, so a span never describes photos it does not cover. How the dating works.
Can I follow one person across the map?
Two ways, and they answer different questions. Choosing a person under Photos of narrows the pins to the places that person is confirmed present, and every count, roster and span retallies against that smaller set. It is the fastest way to find out that your grandmother appears in four towns you had never heard her mention.
The other way is the journey line. The typed chapters of a life, a birthplace, the addresses, a school, a workplace, the trips, join up in date order as a dashed path. One person, in sequence, from where they started to where they ended up. Switch it off when you want the photographs alone.
What will the Atlas not do?
It cannot place a photo whose picture shows nowhere in particular. A portrait against a blank wall, a close-up of a baby, a page of a christening gown: these get no pin, and the Atlas leaves them off the map rather than guessing at a town. A collection can be half on the map and half not.
Pins group by place name, so a whole town sits under one pin and two photos taken a mile apart share it. This is a map of places, not of street corners, and it will not tell you which house.
A pin read from the picture alone can simply be wrong. Two white clapboard churches look alike, and the Atlas will pick one. That is what the dashed ring is for, and why the pin says it is an estimate until a person says otherwise.
The journey lines are drawn only from chapters your family has entered. A relative whose addresses nobody has written down has no path, however many photos of them are on the map. Naming faces and entering chapters is work your family does, and the Atlas sits downstream of it.
Do I keep what I paid for?
You buy a collection once. It is not a subscription, and nothing you have paid for is taken back from you later.
Downloading your photos is never gated and never charged, at full resolution, whatever the state of your account. See pricing.
Back to what Phossil does. The rosters on these pins come from names your family puts to faces, which is a scan away from a box of prints.