Strava has added a new feature for subscribers that now lets you see photos while planning the route on your desktop, and more specifically, lets you see the exact location of those photos. This is a major upgrade from the Strava route photo feature introduced earlier this year, which showed photos along a route taken, but not their location, nor could you plan based on that. Plus, it brings it closer to Komoot's photo-based route planning features.

Since I very regularly use route planning tools and especially photos to create my routes, I thought I would put a twist on this. I find photos incredibly helpful in figuring out whether or not a route is:

A) Safe (mainly for cycling, but sometimes running/etc…)
B) The type of road surface/terrain I want: namely making sure that a road is a road, and gravel is actually gravel-like, and MTB is something completely different
C) Finding beautiful places to see, life is a journey and all that

It's largely no coincidence that most of the epic rides/trail runs/hikes/etc look great on Strava or Instagram. It's because I spend time making sure the views will be amazing.

With that, let's see how this works. First of all, some technical details worth mentioning:

A) Only photos from *BOTH* activities marked as 'Public' and profiles marked as 'Public' will be shown (which means if you have a 'Followers Only' profile, your photos will not be part of it, even if a particular activity is set as fully public.

B) Photos of you within any of your privacy zones are also not included (since privacy zones are large parts of areas, it obviously doesn't matter if other people take photos in your zone).

C) Photos excluded from photo sharing (here) are also excluded here, regardless of whether your profile or activity is public or not

D) Photos cannot contain human bodies (cows are okay), faces, or bicycles. According to Strava, this is filtered out algorithmically.

E) The included photos are updated every 48 hours and photos older than 12 months are excluded

F) This update is specifically targeted at desktop (web browser) and specifically for subscribers

Now to start, open the desktop site and find a place you want to go. You will immediately see some bubbles with pictures on them. These aren't all the photos, these are just some of the photos that the Strava gods find noteworthy. Ironically, having been to those locations so many times, I'd say they missed the boat here in places that really should have been highlighted.

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