Designer, photographer, PicTrax app founder, lover of great coffee and real experiences
Niche travel destinations have become increasingly popular in recent years, as travelers seek out unique and off-the-beaten-path experiences.
PicTrax offers the ability to search and filter destinations based on hashtags and descriptions, and also to create collections of destinations that can be shared publicly by the creator and downloaded by like-minded travelers.
Here are just a few popular niche travel categories that would make highly popular ‘PicTrax Collections’:
Eco-tourism destinations: Eco-tourism destinations focus on sustainable travel and promote responsible practices that help to protect the environment. Examples of eco-tourism destinations include Costa Rica, the Galapagos Islands, and the Amazon rainforest. These can of course also include hyper-local destinations such as ‘The rainforests of south-east Queensland’ or ‘Brisbane Community Gardens’. Are there eco-tourism centric destinations in your local area? Can these be ‘collected’ and shared on PicTrax?
Adventure travel destinations: Adventure destinations offer travelers a chance to explore the great outdoors and participate in thrilling activities like hiking, skiing, kayaking, and surfing. Popular adventure travel destinations include New Zealand, Iceland, and Canada, however, there are myriad adventure destinations globally … Many extreme or adventure-based travel destinations are best enjoyed under instruction or in a controlled group, so feel free to include your tour group or travel company’s URL in your image description. You can attract people looking for adventure and help them to make a booking with your group! When uploading an image to PicTrax that has required access by an extreme method, you can tag it in the upload process using the accessibility icons. If the destination has required mountain climbing to access, please tag it as such so that people with physical limitations, or without mountain climbing experience or equipment know that access may not be achievable for them. When you select an accessibility or activity icon, hashtags are automatically introduced so you don’t have to type them. You may remove these of course and add more if you like!
Cultural travel destinations: These destinations are ideal for travelers who are interested in learning about different cultures and customs. Examples of cultural travel destinations include Japan, Morocco, and Peru. Due to PicTrax’s free UGC (User Generated Content), destinations with zero marketing budget can be found by those wishing to travel to that area and or enjoy the experience you’re offering. Why suffer the cheaply made tourist trinkets of the tourist strip when there are a wealth of real, locally-made and normally priced goods available?
Wellness travel destinations: Wellness travel destinations focus on promoting physical and mental health, and offer a range of activities such as yoga, meditation, spa treatments, and healthy eating options. Popular wellness travel destinations include Bali, Thailand, and India.
Food and drink travel destinations: These destinations are perfect for foodies and wine lovers who want to experience local cuisine and beverages. Group your region’s gastronomical destinations including restaurants, markets, fruit picking, farm-gate produce, wineries, vineyards, distilleries and more in a PicTrax collection and allow visitors to see more of what can be discovered in your area. Read more about promoting a rural area’s destinations here.
Historical travel destinations: Historical travel destinations offer visitors the chance to explore sites of significant historical and cultural importance. How do you find these? Generally, we will only be presented with the high-ticket destinations, however, there is so much more to be discovered. With PicTrax, you can discover convict-built bridges in Tasmania, ruin sites, even in the middle of a paddock or a shipwreck off the coast of Hawaii.
Wildlife travel destinations: These destinations offer travelers the chance to see exotic wildlife in their natural habitats. You can pay to go to a zoo to see a koala, or see koalas and kangaroos in their natural habitat central to the Gold Coast. If your desire is to see Japanese Snow Monkeys (Japanese macaques) as a part of your travel experience, you can use Pictrax to see where you can do this, and book accommodation nearby to facilitate. Yes a zoo may allow you to see them up close or even pet one … the choice of experience is yours.
Accessible tourism: Accessible tourism specifically carters to and offers an experience compatible with a person’s physical or psychological traits. It is our hope that people with special needs can not simply be accommodated, but that the experience that would be deeply meaningful can be discoverable. A road stop with a cacophony of bird calls, or wind that whistles hauntingly through a natural rock formation may be a sensory delight to someone with vision impairment. Please be conscious of the experience another visitor may have if they choose to go there, when writing descriptions and when hash-tagging your uploaded images. When you select an accessibility or activity icon, hashtags are automatically introduced so you don’t have to type them. You may remove these of course and add more if you like! You can read more about accessible tourism here.
Niche travel destinations can attract huge numbers of visitors to a very small number. People can be obsessed with steam trains, street art, sea caves, and photography locations to farm produce. Help people find the destinations you know about, have been to, and would like to share. Not only can the individual have an amazing travel experience, but the region can benefit from increased tourism.
Here you’ll find the answers to several frequently asked questions, designed to help you learn more about PicTrax and how to get the most from it. This section will grow as more questions are added, so if you don’t see an answer to a question you have, ask us in in our contact form at the bottom of this page and we will do our best to answer you.
Upload images to PicTrax from your mobile device:
1/ Tap on the ‘upload’ icon (plus button). You will find this button in the centre of the bottom navigation bar. PicTrax should open your mobile phone or tablet’s gallery.
NOTE: PicTrax may open your phone’s file structure. If that occurs, simply navigate to your device’s image gallery and album or sub folder.
2/ Tap on the image you wish to upload.
NOTE: We suggest ‘favouriting’ or ‘liking’ images in your gallery or saving to a specific folder for easy location. This helps save time later.
3/ If the selected image contains GPS metadata, the image will automatically be pinned to the capture location. If the GPS metadata is missing or incorrect, you can search for a landmark close to the capture location, and navigate to where you were standing by standard pinch zoom control. When the capture location has been found, tap the map to pin the location.
4/ Fill in the required info fields, or you may choose to change the image.
5/ When the upload form is complete, hit ‘Save’ and your image will be uploaded to the private or public location as chosen.
NOTE: Navigating away from this window during the upload process may cause the upload to break.
6/ You will then be taken to your image’s ‘detail view’ where you may check the image, mapped location and info for accuracy, edit the information, make public (or private) or delete the image, or leave it as is.
Make money from PicTrax in three easy steps:
When your credits reach (AUD)$20 you can cash it in from the redeem your earnings page.
What can you do to increase your earnings further?
Encourage friends and family to follow you in PicTrax and like your pix. Each time a unique user likes one of your pix, your earnings grow. During promo events, the Like Action Value will increase. It will be particularly beneficial to gain as many likes as you can during bonus promo events!
Absolutely not! At PicTrax, we are ‘Team You’. The platform was built to assist people in the following ways;
PicTrax has no interest in claiming ownership of user uploaded images, however one or more user images may be seen in on screen video and screenshots taken for promotional purposes.
At PicTrax, we have taken steps to protect your rights by:
If you would like to crop, enhance or otherwise edit an image prior to uploading to PicTrax, it is worth noting that some image editing apps will erase the GPS metadata.
We consistently use Snapseed for image enhancement prior to upload as this app retains the GPS metadata AND saves enhanced pix to a created Snapseed gallery folder/album, which allows for easy retrieval in the upload process.
There may be many other image editing apps that retain GPS metadata – please test on one image before committing to any specific image editing app.
Your personal information will not be retained by PicTrax so therefore it cannot be sold to a third party.
PicTrax does serve advertising. In some instances the advertising platform may match your device ID and match it with ad content that it considers relevant to your profile in their existing records.
PicTrax may use your email address to;
PicTrax may also use your email address to;
You will of course be able to unsubscribe from these emails.
If you are attempting to upload content in a low or intermittent data environment, the upload may break, showing a partial upload. If this occurs, please delete the image and try again at a later date, in a stronger data environment.
If the uploading device is disrupted through; going into ‘sleep mode’, moving away from the upload screen during upload, accepting a call during upload, the image may fail to upload correctly.
If this does occur, please open the image to detail view and use the elipsis menu in the top right of the image pane to delete the image, and attempt upload at another time.
Yes, in both iOS and Android devices, you will have the ability to apply a ‘heart’ to, or ‘favourite’ an image.
This will place the image in a ‘favourites’ folder which will be much easier to access than scrolling through years’ of photos to find the one you wish to upload.
Using the Snapseed app to enhance your images is a great way to separate your enhanced pix from the rest as Snapseed can save the enhanced pix to a Snapseed folder or album.
Manually moving images to a new folder for upload is another way to separate the images you wish to upload to PicTrax.
Many professional photographers have beautiful images they may wish to share on the PicTrax app.
In order to upload these images to PicTrax, the user must be able to get the images onto their mobile phone or tablet. Here are a few methods we can endorse:
Google Drive and or Dropbox: Upload images to Google Drive or Dropbox from your desktop and download to your phone’s gallery using the Google Drive or Dropbox app.
Direct connection: Connect your phone to your computer via USB or Bluetooth and transfer files to your device’s image gallery files.
Digital SLR WiFi: Many modern cameras, such as Canon, have apps that allow WiFi connection to the camera for remote camera control and image transfer. Check to see if such a method exists for your Digital SLR camera make and model.
Note: We advise saving images to a new folder/album created to receive these images or it may be difficult to locate them within your phone’s image collection.
Users may only delete any images that they themselves have uploaded.
You will find all images you have uploaded in your profile page. Your images can also be found in the main view by filtering on ‘my pix’. Pics that have been uploaded by the logged in user will be distinguishable by a small white dot in the bottom right of the thumbnail.
To delete any of your images, open any ‘owned’ image to ‘detail view’. To access detail view, tap on any image thumbnail in your profile’s ‘All’, ‘Public’ or ‘Private’ image tabs. Users may delete that image by hitting the on-image vertical ellipses icon (…) and selecting ‘delete’ from the resulting drop down menu. The ellipsis menu will be found in the top right corner of any image uploaded by the logged in user when seen in detail view.
NOTE: This will immediately and permanently delete images from the PicTrax platform and cannot be undone.
Users may make an image public or private at any time after upload, or during the upload process.
You will final all images you have uploaded in your profile page. Your images can also be found in the main view by filtering on ‘my pix’. Pics that have been uploaded by the logged in user will be distinguished by a small white dot in the bottom right of the thumbnail.
To change the public/private status of any of your images, open any ‘owned’ image in ‘detail view’. To access detail view, tap on any image thumbnail in your profile’s ‘All’, ‘Public’ or ‘Private’ image tabs. Tap on the on-image vertical ellipses icon (…) and select the correct status from the resulting drop down menu. The ellipsis menu will be found in the top right corner of any image uploaded by the logged in user when seen in detail view.
NOTE: No further action need be taken – the image will now be accessible in the public or private domain as stipulated.
Save an image to one or more collections from detail view
1/ After tapping the on-map thumbnail of an iamge you want to collect, you will be taken to ‘detail view’.
2/ Tap on the ‘collect’ (bookmark) icon in the under-image tool bar.
3/ Name your collection or select and existing collection and hit ‘done’. You have now added the image to your collection.
You can edit your profile details by hitting the settings ‘gear’ icon. This icon can be found in the top right corner of your profile page.
Here you can:
NOTE: Changing username may not be permitted if the username has been taken by another user.
Your image’s GPS meta data may be incorrect due to a number of factors such as;
NOTE: PicTrax advises users to routinely check their images info to make sure the image placement is accurate while in the field to ensure images captured will be placed correctly when uploading to PicTrax.
If your image is not automatically pinned on the the map on upload , it generally means your image’s GPS meta data may be missing or the uploading device’s privacy settings may prevent pinning. This can happen due to a number of factors such as;
Inappropriate content
If your image was reported for inappropriate content, your image will be reviewed by PicTrax admin staff and either removed from the platform if the image fails to meet PicTrax’s acceptable publishing standards, or made private, if deemed to be inappropriate for public viewing.
NOTE: No user action is required and no correspondence will be entered into after PicTrax admin action has been taken.
Breach of copyright
If your image was reported for breach of copyright, PicTrax admin staff will investigate the matter.
NOTE: To protect users from ‘internet trolls’, repeated and unfounded reporting may result in the reporting user’s account being deleted.
NOTE: PicTrax admin staff may contact both the user and the reporter to determine the most likely image copyright ownership status. Once PicTrax – through any investigative method deemed appropriate or necessary within Australian law – has determined the most likely owner, the image in question will be removed from the non-owner’s account and no further correspondence will be entered into.
Inaccurate location
If your image was reported for inaccurate location, your image may be made private to ensure other PicTrax users are not directed to wrong locations.
NOTE: No user action is required and no correspondence will be entered into after PicTrax admin action has been taken.
NOTE: No user action is required and no correspondence will be entered into after PicTrax admin action has been taken.
Poor quality or composition
If your image was reported for poor quality or composition, your image may be made private so that you may continue to enjoy your image while maintaining an enjoyable in-app experience for other PicTrax users.
NOTE: No user action is required and no correspondence will be entered into after PicTrax admin action has been taken.
NOTE: PicTrax users, through the acceptance of PicTrax Terms of Service, have agreed to abide by PicTrax acceptable use parameters and multiple breaches or numerous nuisance reporting as well as multiple breaches of PicTrax usage guidelines may see that users’ profile deleted from the platform and potentially banned from PicTrax with no further correspondence being entered into.
PicTrax needs the GPS location data (automatically stored in many digital images taken on mobile phones and or cameras) in order to plot the image on the global map so that others may discover the location for themselves, or so that you can plot your private journeys on a global map.
This is the true purpose of PicTrax and images that are not of destination specific subject matter may be removed from the platform.
What data does PicTrax collect from digital images?
PicTrax will access and use the following info from images you upload to the platform to help other users be able to find the location and replicate the image’s capture conditions. These include:
There are several reasons an image may be removed from PicTrax after upload. These can include;
1/ Lack of copyright
2/ Inappropriate or explicit content
3/ Poor composition
4/ Non destination specific subject matter
Note: This platform differs from Instagram in its destination specific nature. For this reason, uploaded pictures of people, food, animals or objects that are not destination specific and do not add to the travel and photographic exploration experience for other users may be deleted from the platform.