Cave maps and cave locations

Ever wanted to see a map of all the different caves you've visited? Well now you can! Your personalised cave map will be automatically generated from your trips and can be accessed from the sidebar.

In order to make use of this feature, you'll have to start adding cave locations to your trips. As of today, when you create or update a trip, you will be offered the option to enter a latitude and longitude - or a nearby place name - to store as the cave location.

To make things easier, there is an easy to use interface to update your existing trips. The page will present you with the details of a random trip to quickly add a location to. In addition, it will offer a list of similar trips to update simultaneously, so that if you have many trips to one cave system you do not have to update them all separately.

I realise that cave location privacy is a hot topic and many people are not comfortable sharing them. At the moment, all cave locations added to caves.app are completely private. There is no option to make a cave location public. Nobody who views a trip will be able to see the location of the cave — even if the trip is public. The only person who will be able to view the stored location is the person who added the trip. The cave map is also completely private and can only be viewed by you.

If you don't feel comfortable adding locations to your trips then you simply do not have to. The full functionality of the service remains without adding any location data. If you want to use the map feature but don't want to store your cave locations on caves.app, you can simply add locations that are in the general area (such as a nearby town) but not the location of the actual entrance.

More location based features will be added in the future — such as listing trips to other caves nearby when viewing your trips, or using the location and time data from a trip to match it with a trip that your friend has added. As with everything on caves.app, these features will be implemented with the privacy of your data as the primary concern, and any sharing of data with other users — even ones you've added as friends — will be made extremely explicit and be strictly on an opt-in basis.

With all that said — I hope you enjoy the new feature! Thanks for using caves.app.

P.S. Tell your friends!