Photerra Nearby – Local Attractions & Travel Map Widget

Photerra Nearby puts a beautiful map and photo gallery of the local attractions around you onto any WordPress page — free, in about a minute, with no account and no code. Every photograph is a real place at a real coordinate, taken by a traveler or drawn from openly-licensed archives, and every one carries its credit. It updates itself as new photos arrive, so the "things to do nearby" section of your site stops going stale the week after you write it. Made for the sites where place matters: hotels and vacation rentals ("explore the area"), tour operators, travel blogs, and tourism boards. Why you might want it

• Free, and free for commercial use. No account, no trial, no paid tier.
• Genuinely lightweight. The plugin renders a lazy-loaded iframe that reserves its height in advance — nothing render-blocking, nothing that can shift your layout.
• No cookies, no visitor tracking. It sets nothing in the browser, so it needs no entry in your cookie banner.
• Every photo credited. Traveler photography names the contributor; openly-licensed archive photography names the author, the licence and the source, with links.
• Themeable. Light / dark / auto, your accent colour, background and font, three style presets, and five layouts — compact grid, map, strip, sidebar rail, or a small badge.
• Curated, not just nearest. It leads with the photographs that show a place worth looking at, and keeps back the ones that do not — a stadium concert, a shopfront, a photo of a festival rather than of the park it was held in.
• Nothing left behind. Delete the plugin and its one settings row goes with it: no residue, no stored data, no account.

An honest note on SEO The widget renders inside an iframe, so its content is not indexed as part of your page and it will not improve your search rankings. We would rather say so here than let you find out later. What it does is give your visitors a reason to stay and explore the area, which is the thing that actually matters on a page about where you are. How to use Block: add the Photerra Nearby block (search for it in the inserter — it is under Media), then choose the location, layout, style preset, theme and colours in the block sidebar. Shortcode: [photerra_nearby hub="sf" layout="grid" theme="auto" rows="2"] Attributes: hub (sf, pdx, la, sd, phi, np, hi, mx), lat/lng for an exact location, layout (grid, map, strip, rail, badge), theme (auto, light, dark), rows for grid and map (1–8), count for strip and rail (3–24), accent (hex colour), preset (editorial, minimal, native), bg, font, border. Set site-wide defaults under Settings → Photerra Nearby. Don't see your area yet? Locations are added on request — email info@photerra.com. External service This plugin displays content from Photerra (https://photerra.com), a travel photography service operated by Photerra, Inc. It renders an <iframe> pointing at https://photerra.com/embed/v1/frame. Your visitor's browser loads that frame, which then requests spot data and photographs from Photerra. As with any request, Photerra receives the visitor's IP address and user-agent, recorded in ordinary server access logs. The frame also sends Photerra one diagnostic message per load describing the embed — which domain it loaded on, which location was requested, whether it rendered, and how many photographs it showed — so broken installations can be found. It contains no visitor identifier, no page path, no referrer and no coordinates. No cookies are set and nothing is stored in the browser. If a visitor opens the map view, their browser additionally loads map software from jsDelivr (https://www.jsdelivr.com) and map tiles from OpenFreeMap (https://openfreemap.org). The default gallery view loads neither. Terms of service: https://photerra.com/terms Privacy policy: https://photerra.com/privacy

0.2.0

• The block now appears in the inserter. It never did: the block was registered without a title, and WordPress silently refuses a title-less block — so the editor showed "Your site doesn't include support for the Photerra Nearby block" even with the plugin active, and only the shortcode worked. Block metadata now lives in block.json.
• The block preview in the editor sizes itself and matches the page's light/dark theme, instead of sitting at a fixed height in the visitor's OS theme.
• Clicking the preview now selects the block instead of interacting with the widget inside it.
• New block controls: style preset (Editorial / Minimal / Native), font, background, and border — previously reachable only from the shortcode.
• The block supports wide and full alignment, and the editor's margin controls.
• New setting: default style preset.
• The built-in default location is now San Francisco rather than Portland. Any location you have set explicitly is unchanged.
• Deleting the plugin now removes its settings row.
• The editor interface is translatable.

0.1.0

• Initial release: [photerra_nearby] shortcode, Photerra Nearby block, and a settings page for site-wide defaults.