Trip photos
Where the destination photos on trip cards and the trip hero come from, and why some trips show the default image.
Every trip in Limbo wears a photo of its destination. You'll see it in four places:
- Trip cards on Home — the photo is the card, with the trip details over it.
- The trip hero — the big collapsing header at the top of the trip screen.
- Archived Trips — small thumbnails in Settings → Archived Trips.
- The voting dashboard header — a thumbnail next to the trip name.

Where the photo comes from
When you create a trip, Limbo looks up your destination's city on Unsplash, a public photo library, and attaches the best match automatically — no setup, nothing to pick. The lookup uses the city part of your destination ("Lisbon" from "Lisbon, Portugal"), so trips to the same city tend to get the same kind of skyline.
This happens once, while the trip is being created, and the photo is then stored with the trip — so cards and heroes load it the same way for everyone on the crew, and it keeps showing after the first load even when you're offline.
When you see the default image instead
Some trips show Limbo's built-in travel image rather than a destination photo:
- No photo matched the destination — small towns and unusual place names sometimes come up empty.
- The lookup failed at creation time — trip creation never waits on the photo, so a hiccup just means no photo.
- The destination was changed later — editing a trip's destination doesn't fetch a new photo, so the trip falls back to the default image. The photo lookup only runs when the trip is created.
Note
There's currently no way to choose or upload your own trip photo — the destination photo and the default image are the two options. If the photo matters to you, it's one more reason to get the destination right when creating the trip.

Other photos in the app
Don't confuse the trip photo with the other images you'll run into:
- Place suggestions (Need Inspiration?, place search) show photos from Google Places — a different source, attached per plan.
- Profile and companion avatars are uploaded by each person from their own profile.
- Chat photos are whatever your crew shares in the conversation.
Permissions
member Trip photos are automatic and the same for everyone — there's nothing to configure, and no role unlocks photo controls.
Related articles
Create a trip
Every field on the new-trip form — name, destination, dates, timezone, currency — plus what the voting toggle really does.
The trip screen
A tour of the trip screen — the photo hero, the four tabs, the action circles for filtering, voting, and the map, and the ⋯ menu.
The Home screen explained
A tour of Home — the decisions inbox, trip cards with chat bubbles, plans waiting for review, notifications, and the buttons that start everything.

