Guide

How to use it

The short version: post photographs, follow people whose work you like, and put the ones you want to keep into albums. Everything below is detail on top of that.

Posting a photograph

Tap the upload button, choose a file, and add a caption. Camera settings are read out of the photograph automatically — camera, lens, ISO, aperture, shutter and focal length — and shown under the frame, so you rarely have to type any of it.

Your original is kept exactly as you uploaded it. Full resolution, EXIF intact, nothing re-compressed. What the feed serves is a smaller copy made for the screen; the file you sent is untouched.

Rotating and straightening

Before you post, you can turn a photograph a quarter at a time and level a horizon by up to fifteen degrees either way. There is no crop and there are no filters — these are corrections to how the camera was held, not edits to the picture.

Straightening does cost you the corners. Rotating a rectangle by a few degrees leaves triangular gaps, so the result is scaled up just enough to cover them and the edges fall outside the frame. That is unavoidable and it is what every straighten tool does. It applies only to the copies people see — the file you uploaded is still archived exactly as it came off the camera, un-straightened.

Two account types

Viewer and photographer. Both can post photographs — that is the part people get wrong. Photographer mode adds your kit, the genres you shoot, links to your work, and camera settings shown on your photographs.

Switching to viewer hides all of that rather than deleting it. Switch back and everything returns, including the settings on photographs you have already posted.

Albums

Albums are the way to keep something. There is no separate saved-items list, deliberately — a shelf you have arranged is worth more than a pile.

You can put anybody's photograph into your album, not only your own. The credit travels with it. Albums can be private, in which case only you can see them.

Finding an old photograph: when you are choosing pictures for an album, there is a hashtag filter above the grid and a row of the tags you use most, with counts. Tap #elk and the grid shows only your elk photographs. That is the answer to "I posted it two years ago and I am not scrolling back through four thousand frames to find it".

Restops

Tap the restop button to share a photograph with your followers. Hold it instead of tapping to add a note first.

You can restop your own work, and it is often worth doing — a photograph you posted in March is gone from your followers' feeds by April. It will not appear twice on your own profile.

Restops stack. If five people you follow all restop the same photograph, you see it once, credited to the most recent of them and marked "and 4 others" — not five times down the feed. You will not see the photographer's original post and a restop of it as two separate cards either. One photograph, one card, however many people passed it on.

Your kit

In photographer mode you can list your bodies, lenses and accessories. It appears behind the camera icon at the top of your profile, where anybody looking at your work can find it in one tap.

Genres save the moment you tap them — there is no save button, and there is deliberately not one. Kit items and links use an Add button because they are typed rather than chosen.

Links stay hidden until you have posted your first photograph. That is an anti-spam rule and it applies to everybody. Post something and they appear.

Hashtags

Write #anything in a caption and it becomes a link to a page of every photograph carrying that tag. Up to ten per photograph, and editing a caption updates its tags.

Tags come from what you actually wrote — there is no separate tag field, and nothing can add a tag to your photograph except your own caption.

They are also how you find your own work later, in search and in the album picker. Tagging consistently is worth the two seconds it takes.

The four feeds

• Latest — everything, newest first.
• Following — only the people you follow.
• Featured — the best-performing work of the last seven days.
• For you — a shuffle, nudged slightly toward photographers near you.

For you is a shuffle rather than a ranking on purpose. A ranking would need weights, and weights on a small network are a guess dressed up as a recommendation.

Swipe sideways anywhere on the feed to move between them, or tap the strip at the top. Swiping stops at each end rather than wrapping round.

You do not have to keep all four. Feed settings, under the gear on your own profile, turns any of them off — they disappear from the strip and swiping skips them. One has to stay on, so the last switch will not move.

Discover

The magnifying glass at the top of the feed. Search for a person by handle or name, or for a subject by hashtag — and when the box is empty it shows a row of Montana tags, what has been busy this week, and photographers worth following.

It is made entirely of members' photographs. There is no news section and there is not going to be one: every post here is a photograph, and a text feed would mean a second kind of content with its own rules, its own moderation and an editorial job that never ends.

Insights

Every account has an Insights screen, behind the chart icon at the top of your own profile — beside the gear, not inside it. It shows how many people saw your photographs, how many followed, and what they did — likes, comments, restops, shares and saves.

Three things on it are worth understanding:

• Views are lifetime; the chart is 90 days. Individual views are kept for ninety days and then deleted, so the chart and the total are measuring different things and will not add up.
• Link opens are approximate. They count anybody opening a shared link, including people with no account, and there is no way to tell repeat visitors apart without tracking them — which this app does not do.
• Shares only count shares made in the app. A link somebody copied by hand into a message is invisible. The real numbers are higher than these, never lower.

Nobody else can see any of it. It is not a public score.

Settings worth knowing about

• Sign my photographs, in Edit profile. Adds your handle to the corner of the copy other people see. On by default; your original is never changed.
• Photographers near you, in Account & security. Off until you turn it on. What is stored is rounded to about eleven kilometres, is never shown to anybody, and is only used to order one feed.
• Notifications, under the gear. Every category can be switched off. The weekly digest is the only one that is off until you switch it on.
• Feed settings, under the gear. Choose which of the four feeds appear, and whether camera settings show under photographs as you read. Both are kept on the device you set them on rather than on your account, so they do not follow you to a second phone.
• Appearance, behind the sun icon at the top of your own profile, between insights and the gear. Also still reachable from Edit profile. Three themes; Montana is the default.
• Help & support, under the gear. Opens a thread with a person, and you are told when there is a reply. If you cannot sign in at all, the contact form on the website reaches the same place.

Hiding camera settings while you read

The camera-settings switch in Feed settings changes what you see, on everybody's photographs. It does not hide the settings on your own work from anybody else, and it does not affect your insights. If you would rather your own photographs carried no settings at all, switch your account to viewer mode instead.

Last updated 8 August 2026