Hi @bricin ,

Thanks for posting about this!  It sounds like the icons you're looking at are POIs (points of interest).  Maps on both the Strava mobile app and website will include a Points of Interest map layer to help you find the best spots in your area to start your activity and useful locations throughout your activity.  You won't be able to drill into those icons but you can select them by long pressing on them, and then your route will be adjusted to include that POI.

Detailed information about POIs can be found here and we have a helpful legend here.  

There is an existing discussion about POI and we would welcome your comments!

Hi Jane - tried posting a reply before but it disappeared into the ether.

Unfortunately this does not *solve* the issue - showing a POI without any information or visualization is, for my routing needs, worthless. I don't know *why* the person posted the POI. And when I actually get to that spot in the real world I cannot determine anything about it.

How does one get this into the Product team's hands for a true solution? It seems pretty simple to include any given photo associated with the POI as part of the long press / click event.

Hey @bricin -- we just launched photos on routes today and this update is somewhat related to your query so I wanted to make you aware of it. You can learn more about this update HERE.

Thanks for sharing this feature. That said... this isn't particularly useful. It shows me photos from Routes (problem #1) and it doesn't indicate _where_ the photo was taken (problem#2).

The first problem is that Routes aren't particularly useful as 90% of the time I am not going to do an exact Route. Adding a loop, getting to the route, etc. I'd suggest the Product Team takes a hard look at Routes as a planning tool and assess usability.

More importantly though is problem #2 - let's say I see a Route, e.g. Green Mountain. First, there is no indication there are photos for this. Second, the photos, while often lovely, do not show me the Route. So I can tell, at best, that things might not be snow covered. But I cannot use any of these photos for route-finding or waypoints.

Disappointing to see something so close but yet so far. Hopefully this is fixed in future revisions. Sorry to be such a downer...

This is useful feedback, I do appreciate you taking the time to look into it and reply. I'll be passing this on to our product team! I wonder if something like this idea (Integrate Street View into Strava Routes) is more aligned with what you'd find valuable.

Hi Soren - using street view would be fine as long as we have coverage where there are no streets 🙂 

As they say in “Back to the Future” - where we’re going, there are no roads.

Frankly your geospatial team should be able to plot all those photos without any trouble at all (since they are already clustering the photos along the route line) Anything without proper EXIF / geo tagging could be omitted from the route view while kept for the gallery view

Thanks for bringing up this question! It's great to see that you're utilizing the photo icons on the map to help with your route planning. While it may not be immediately obvious, there is a way to access the photos associated with these icons. To view the photos, try right-clicking (or control-clicking on a Mac) on the photo icon, and then select "View Photo" from the menu that appears. This should allow you to see the photo and use it to help with navigation on your planned route.

Thanks for bringing up this question! It's great to see that you're utilizing the photo icons on the map to help with your route planning. While it may not be immediately obvious, there is a way to access the photos associated with these icons. To view the photos, try right-clicking (or control-clicking on a Mac) on the photo icon, and then select "View Photo" from the menu that appears. This should allow you to see the photo and use it to help with navigation on your planned route.

Unfortunately that does not work, at least not on Mac + Firefox. It was one of the things I tried early on. There is no event fired for this and no menu during route planning.

And checked on Mac + Chrome - same problem.

Just catching up with this thread, as I am doing some route planning for off-track exploring one of the world's leading heritage areas (Tongariro National Park, New Zealand) and can see photo icons in interesting remote locations. However there's no ability to correlate those icons with either specific photos of the location, or the route taken through.
I think it would be valuable to either be able to right-click the photo icon and choose to view related photos, or to be able to see which area of the map photos relate to as browsing them. Even better would be both options!