Images & Media

Upload and manage photos for your tours

Images & Media

A Grand Tour lets you enhance your expedition plans with photos and images, bringing your journey to life and helping you remember why you wanted to visit each destination.

Where You Can Add Images

Images can be uploaded throughout the application:

Tour Cover Images

Set a compelling cover image for your tour that appears on your tour overview and when sharing your plan with others.

Itinerary Items

Add photo galleries to individual itinerary items (days or stops). This is perfect for:

• Inspiration photos of places you want to visit
• Reference images for accommodations you've booked
• Maps or diagrams of hiking trails
• Photos of dishes you want to try at specific restaurants

Dataset Items

Upload images to your custom points of interest, scenic routes, and other dataset items to help identify them on the map and remember why they caught your attention.

Profile Avatars

Personalize your account with a profile photo that appears throughout the app and to collaborators.

The Upload Process

Uploading images is straightforward:

1. Click the upload button or drag and drop files into the upload area
2. Select one or multiple image files from your device
3. Images upload directly to secure cloud storage (no waiting through your server)
4. Processing happens in the background - you can continue working immediately

Automatic Image Variants

When you upload an image, A Grand Tour automatically creates optimized variants:

• Thumbnail (200px wide): For galleries and lists
• Medium (800px wide): Perfect for viewing on most screens
• Large (1600px wide): High resolution for detailed viewing
• Original: Your full-quality original is always preserved

Variants keep the original's proportions — none of them is cropped — and all three are written as WebP, which is why a JPEG upload yields .webp variants.

This ensures fast loading times throughout the app while keeping your high-quality originals available when needed.

Image Galleries

For itinerary items that support multiple images, you'll see a gallery interface where you can:

• Upload multiple images at once
• Reorder images by dragging
• Set a primary image that represents the item
• Delete images you no longer need
• Click to view full-screen lightbox

Supported Formats

A Grand Tour accepts the most common image formats:

• JPEG/JPG: The standard for photographs
• PNG: Great for images with transparency or graphics
• WebP: Modern format with excellent compression

HEIC is not accepted, and this catches people out: an iPhone shoots HEIC by default, so photos sent straight off the camera roll are refused. Either set Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible on the phone, or export as JPEG before uploading.

Storage and Privacy

Your images are stored securely in Cloudflare R2, an S3-compatible cloud storage service. This means:

• Fast delivery: Images are served from a global content delivery network
• Reliable storage: Enterprise-grade redundancy and backup
• Secure access: Images are only accessible to you and collaborators you've invited
• Privacy control: For private tours, images are never publicly accessible

Best Practices

File Sizes

10MB per image is a hard limit, not a guideline — a larger file is rejected rather than slow. Beyond that:

• For very large images (like high-resolution scans), resize before uploading
• Modern phone cameras produce excellent images that don't need to be full resolution

Organizing Images

• Use descriptive filenames before uploading (they're easier to find later)
• Add images to itinerary items as you plan, not all at the end
• For multi-day hikes or drives, consider creating separate itinerary items for each segment with relevant images

Image Quality

• Photos from modern smartphones work great
• Screenshots from Google Street View can help you recognize locations
• Travel photography from Wikimedia Commons or Unsplash can inspire (check licenses)
• Your own photos from previous trips make planning more personal

Performance

The app is optimized to handle tours with hundreds of images:

• Thumbnails load instantly in galleries
• Full-resolution images only load when you click to view
• The map uses lightweight icons instead of loading all images
• Image processing happens in background jobs, so uploads never slow you down

Related articles:

• Itineraries - Learn where to add images in your day-by-day plans
• Points of Interest - Add images to POIs for visual reference
• Exporting Data - Images are included in PDF exports