The world’s first web-app photo guides

PhotoSecrets New York, London and Paris


By Andrew Hudson Published: December 21, 2012 Updated: November 18, 2016

By Andrew Hudson Published: December 21, 2012 Updated: November 18, 2016

PhotoSecrets is proud to announce the first web-app photo guides. Launched on December 21, 2012, these are the world’s first free, online, interactive travel guides for photographers. Created by Andrew Hudson, the guides are PhotoSecrets New York, PhotoSecrets London and PhotoSecrets Paris.

Each guide shows all the classic, postcard views along with maps and information for you to quickly find the spot and create your shot. An interactive map allows you to zoom through the city and see where each viewpoint is located. An interactive gallery brings up GPS coordinates and street address. And dedicated pages for each sight detail exact sunrise, sunset and dusk times, plus other relevant information, for you to plan your location photography.

About PhotoSecrets

In 1994, I took a trip around the world — with my camera. One place I’d always wanted to visit was the beach used in the 1974 James Bond film, The Man With The Golden Gun. The world’s most expensive assassin, Scaramanga, lives on an island with a limestone tower in the bay. As a boy in England, this seemed to me the epitome of exotic, idyllic, far-away romance, and a place I had to photograph.

But none of the travel books I had showed a picture of the location. Instead I had to buy postcards and ask locals for directions. So I thought there ought to be a travel guide that, instead of having text about hotels with photos as illustrations, had photos of destinations with text to describe them. I would call this book, “PhotoSecrets.”

Inspired (or reckless), I quit my engineering job and dove into a world I knew nothing about: publishing. Choosing San Francisco as the first book, I drove around the Bay Area, photographed every classic sight, and slept in a tent or my car at night. I bought an Apple Quadra 605, scanned my 35mm Velvia slides, and laid out the book in our condo’s spare bedroom. In April 1997, I printed PhotoSecrets San Francisco and Northern California.

This was the first-ever color travel guide for photographers. It won the Benjamin Franklin Award for Best First Book and fortunately became a hit, selling over 30,000 copies. I followed it up with PhotoSecrets San Diego which won the Grand Prize in the National Self-Published Book Awards.

But the books took a long time to create, as I was doing all the photography, maps, text, writing and layout. So I dabbled with coffee-table books instead and the series went on hiatus.

After the iPhone was introduced, I tried to imagine what PhotoSecrets could look like in the age of the Internet-enabled camera. I spent an embarrassingly long time learning HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. The PhotoSecrets website — online as a marketing tool since 1995 — went through many revisions as I experimented with formats.

Finally, the project is now live. On December 21, 2012, I am proud to introduce the world’s first free, online, interactive travel guides for photographers: PhotoSecrets New York, PhotoSecrets London and PhotoSecrets Paris.

Next page: Instagram’s top locations of 2012

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