The problem
Every country counter runs on the honour system
Which is fine, right up until the number starts to matter to you.
Scratch maps, spreadsheets, the app on your phone: all of them accept whatever you tell them. That is not a flaw; a personal record is for you, and lying to yourself is a solved problem. But two things break it. The first is memory: a decade in, the edges genuinely blur, and the question of whether that Sunday in 2016 was in Slovakia or still Austria has no answer you trust.
The second is comparison. Put a count next to somebody else’s, on a leaderboard, in a conversation, over a bet, and an unverifiable number is worth exactly what an unverifiable number is ever worth.
What used to work
The passport stamp is fading out
It was never complete, and it is getting less complete every year.
Internal Schengen crossings are not stamped at all. Automated e-gates frequently skip the stamp. A growing number of countries record entry electronically and stamp nothing. And a passport is replaced every ten years, taking its evidence with it into a drawer.
So a stamp remains good evidence when you happen to have one, and its absence has stopped meaning anything. That asymmetry is what makes it unusable as the basis of a count.
Boarding passes and hotel bookings have the same shape of problem: they prove an intention and a purchase, not an arrival.
What is left
The geotag your phone already writes
Not the photograph. The metadata attached to it.
When a phone takes a picture with location access granted, it writes an EXIF block alongside the image: latitude, longitude, and the moment the shutter opened. The photograph is the part you look at; the EXIF is the part that constitutes evidence.
This distinction matters more than it sounds. A photo of a landmark proves a camera was pointed at a landmark, possibly at a postcard of one. A photo with coordinates 40 metres from that landmark, taken at 14:12 on a Tuesday, is a different kind of object.
Three things that quietly remove it
Location permission denied to the camera, at which point nothing is written at all. Uploading to most social networks, which strip EXIF on ingest. And sharing from iOS, which offers, helpfully and by default in some flows, to remove location before sending. In each case the original in your library usually keeps its data; it is the copy that loses it.
How GetMap uses it
A quest, a photo, and 200 metres
The mechanism in full, including what it does not do.
A quest sits on a real place with real coordinates. You go there, take a photo, and upload it. Your browser reads the photo’s own geotag and measures the distance to the quest point. Inside 200 metres, the check-in counts: the country fills in, the points land, the streak holds.
The distance is computed on your device. A photo with no location data cannot be verified, and GetMap tells you so instead of quietly accepting it. That refusal is the part that makes the successful check-ins mean something.
What it does not do
It does not defeat a determined forger. EXIF is editable, and someone who wants a fake check-in badly enough will get one. That was never the target. The target is the ordinary case: a person who has genuinely been to thirty-something countries and would like the record to be better than a number they typed in from memory.
It also does not follow you. There is no background location tracking and no timeline being built; the only thing measured is a photo you chose to upload, at the moment you upload it.
The quest catalogue is open on every plan: browse it here, or read which countries a count should contain in the first place.
Questions