Description
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, corner radius and font, and five layouts — compact grid, map, strip, sidebar rail, or a small badge.
- Nothing left behind. Remove the block or shortcode and that is the end of 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 and choose a location, layout and colour in the sidebar.
Shortcode:
[photerra_nearby hub="pdx" layout="grid" theme="auto" rows="2"]
Attributes: hub (pdx, sf, 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
Screenshots
Blocks
This plugin provides 1 block.
- Photerra Nearby
FAQ
Is it really free?
Yes, including on commercial sites — hotels, vacation rentals, tour operators, restaurants, tourism boards and travel publishers. There is no account, no trial and no paid tier.
Does it slow my site down?
No. The widget renders inside a lazy-loaded iframe that reserves its height up front, plus one small asynchronous resize script — so it never blocks your page render and cannot cause layout shift.
No. It sets no cookies, writes nothing to browser storage, and creates no visitor identifier, so it needs no entry in your cookie banner. See the “External service” section above for exactly what is and is not sent.
Why is the block showing an empty box in the editor?
Some editors and page builders do not execute embedded frames on the editing canvas. Save and view the page and it renders. If it is still empty on the live page, see the troubleshooting guide below.
What if there aren’t many places near me?
For an exact lat/lng it shows the nearest real spots (up to 500 miles out), and when there is genuinely nothing to show it says so honestly instead of rendering a broken-looking box. Coverage is real where it exists and thin where it isn’t — locations are added deliberately, on request, not scraped.
Can I change the colours and layout?
Yes — in the block sidebar, in Settings Photerra Nearby, or in the visual builder at https://photerra.com/embed/v1/configurator which previews your exact settings against real data.
Who owns the photographs?
The photographers do. Displaying the widget is covered by Photerra’s terms, and every photo carries its credit inside the widget. The one condition is that credits are not removed or covered.
Where do I get help?
https://photerra.com/for-business/help — or email info@photerra.com, where a real person answers.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“Photerra Nearby – Local Attractions & Travel Map Widget” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
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Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
0.1.0
- Initial release:
[photerra_nearby]shortcode, Photerra Nearby block, and a settings page for site-wide defaults.