How the map works

Atlas is a thin map over your library. Every entity that gets captured with a location ends up as a pin. This page covers where the location comes from and how the map’s queries work.

How it works

Where the location comes from

When you capture something or save something, Moonjar checks for a location three ways:

Your phone’s location, if you’ve granted location permission. This is the default — anything you create while signed in to the app gets your phone’s lat/lon attached.
Photo metadata — a photo you save with EXIF coordinates uses the EXIF location, not your current location. So a photo of a beach you took last year pins on the beach, not where you saved it from.
Address resolution — when the chat assistant uses the geocode tool to resolve a place name (“a cafe in Fitzroy”), the resulting lat/lon attaches to whatever it’s writing.

Reverse geocoding runs in the background to attach a human-readable location label (city, country) so the map and lists can show “Brisbane, Australia” rather than raw coordinates.

What gets pinned

Five kinds of items can have a location and appear on Atlas:

Documents — webpages, photos, files, scans you’ve captured.
Memories — saved memories.
Reminders — items in your reminder lists.
Collection items — rows in collections that have a location field, or the position the item was created at.
Conversations — chats are tagged with where they happened.

Items without a location are simply not on the map. There’s no “unknown location” pin.

How the map fetches pins

When you pan or zoom, Moonjar asks for pins in the current bounding box of the viewport, capped at 500 per type by default (2,000 max). The pin density determines clustering, which happens client-side as you zoom. Filtering to one entity type or one date range restricts the query — a Documents only filter doesn’t load memories or reminders at all.

Why it matters

Atlas reframes your library by where, instead of by when or what. “Show me everything I captured in Tokyo last March” — zoom in, filter by date, the relevant subset is on screen. Same data, different access path.

Limits

Items without a location don’t appear. Granting location permission to Moonjar makes the map much more complete.
Photo EXIF takes precedence over your phone’s location for that photo. If your camera strips EXIF, the photo will pin where you captured it from, not where the photo was taken.
The map is per-account. Group-shared items show up too, with the same access rules as everywhere else.