Pin your travels
on a living globe.

Most travel-sharing apps ask you to hand your photos and location data over to a platform you don't control. GlobePins started as a personal itch: a way to mark the places I'd actually been — a beach in Kollam, a lighthouse at Thangassery, a stadium visit, a trip to Dubai — on something that felt more alive than a flat list or a private camera roll. A spinning 3D globe, with real photos pinned to real coordinates, felt like the right shape for that.

It's built on Next.js, with images processed and served through ImageKit for fast, responsive delivery regardless of device. The globe rendering, pin placement, and satellite map layer are all handled client-side, so exploring pins feels immediate rather than waiting on page reloads. Under the "Explore" and "Feed" views, pins can be filtered by All, Mine, Following, or Popular, and each pin supports comments and ratings, so it functions as a small social layer on top of the map, not just a static gallery.

The decision to open-source it was deliberate. Travel and location data is personal, and a project built around pinning where you've been should be auditable by the people using it — you can read exactly how photos are stored, how coordinates are handled, and what (if anything) is shared with third parties. It also means anyone can self-host their own instance instead of depending on a single hosted service staying online indefinitely, or fork it to build a version scoped to their own community, city, or travel group.

GlobePins is still actively developed as a side project alongside client work — new features get added when a real use case surfaces, not on a fixed roadmap. If you're a developer curious about 3D globe rendering, geo-tagged photo pipelines, or building a lightweight social layer on top of a map, the source is the best place to start.