Map View
The Map view plots every geotagged photo in your library on an interactive world map. Pan, zoom, and click clusters to drill into specific places.
What you see
- Clusters — at zoomed-out levels, nearby photos are grouped into circular badges showing the photo count.
- Pins — individual photos at high zoom.
- Filmstrip — clicking a cluster or pin opens a side panel with the photos for that location and a scrollable filmstrip.
Map tiles
Smriti uses OpenStreetMap tiles via MapLibre GL. Tiles are downloaded on demand when you pan to a region for the first time, then cached locally on your drive. Subsequent visits to the same region serve from cache — no further network requests.
Cache location: OS user cache directory (Linux:
~/.cache/smriti/map-tiles/, macOS:
~/Library/Caches/smriti/map-tiles/, Windows:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\smriti\Cache\map-tiles\).
Cache size cap: configurable in Settings → Map → Tile cache size. The default 500 MB is enough for the regions you regularly visit; older tiles are evicted LRU-style.
To disable map tile loading entirely: simply don’t open the Map view. Tiles only load while it’s visible.
Working offline
Once you’ve panned over a region in Map view, those tiles are permanently cached and work without internet. Useful before a trip where you know you’ll want to browse without connectivity.
To clear the cache (e.g. before donating the drive), use Settings → Map → Clear tile cache.
Photos without GPS
Photos that lack EXIF GPS tags don’t appear on the map. You can still find them in:
- The Timeline (everything’s there)
- A search for the place name (if the place was filled in manually)
Place names
When GPS is present, Smriti resolves it to a city + country via the local GeoNames database (part of the asset pack). Place names feed into Search and album-suggestion detection. If your photos have GPS but no place names yet, run Settings → Fill in place names.
The GeoNames data ships with the asset pack — it’s offline. No request to a geocoding API.