FAQ

What’s all about?
How to explore Hikr.org?
What’s a report?
Can I publish my old tours?
Can I see a page with the list of all my reports?
Is hikr.org only a collection of personal pages or can we play together?
How many photos can I add with my reports?
Can I upload photos without a report?
What's about copyrights?
Why there is a train on your logo?
Can I put hikr logo on my page? Do you have stickers?
Who are people behind hikr.org?

Reports
Photos
Waypoints
Communities
Photo contests
Personal website
Lists
Comments
User accounts
Private messages
Maps

Hikr.org is a non-profit website where people publish reports and photos of their mountain-tours in order to keep memories and share experiences, impressions and other useful information with the community.

Hikr.org is a place where to search for new ideas for mountain-tours. We already have few thousands detailed and informative reports in more than 400 regions of the world, and growing.

Hikr.org is a huge photo-gallery of many thousands photos of the mountains and the nature.

Hikr.org is a club where you can meet other mountain people like you.

Everyone can participate for free.
 

There are many ways to explore Hikr. You can look at the list of regions, you can use the map, you can search for a particular summit in the directory, you can  browse the list of thematic communities, you can navigate in the photo galleries, you can look at personal pages of our users or you can simply use the search.

This is where you describe your mountain tour. You can describe the route, write about your impressions, and provide useful tips. Did you like it? What was interesting? Which parts of the route are more difficult that others? Is there any danger? Which equipment did you use? Share your experience! More about reports

Can I publish my old tours?

Yes. You can publish all your tours, old and recent. The reports you have published will stay here, we don’t delete or archive old reports.
 

Yes and you have even more. Hikr.org is based on the principle of the personal tour guide (Tourenbuch in German). Each user has a personal customizable website (for example this is mine http://anna.hikr.org/) with several pages, like journal, photo- gallery, map, etc.
 

Hikr.org is a collaborative website and community. There are many features that connect reports and users together. First of all Hikr is like a big guidebook, where reports are sorted by region, activity, difficulty and other criteria. We have a common map, a common photo-gallery, thematic communities, etc. On a more personal level, each report can have many participants; each user can have a list of friends and easily check for their last reports. And, last but not least, there is a community in the real world: people make friends and go hike together.
 

Photos are a very important part of this site. There is no limit of number of photos per report, but only a limit of 20Mb upload per month. However, you can become our sponsor by buying a Pro account without this limit and without advertising.

No, currently you can’t.

You keep all copyrights and other intellectual rights on all your contributions. The only thing we can do with your contributions is to show them on hikr.org website. You can delete your contributions when you want. Read our disclaimer
 

The train is here to promote the use of public transportations by hikers and mountaineers. We think that there are too much people who come to the mountains by car and there are too many cars in the mountains. If more people leave their cars at home and come to mountains by a public transport, where it is possible, it would be great!

The collection of all hikr.org logos and buttons is available here.
 

First of all, there are more than a hundred active contributors of hikr.org who publish here their reports and photos. Those people created all the content you can find here.

There is also a small team composed of me (Anna) and Stani. We are developpers and administrators of this site. We are addicted to mountains and to web programming. Hikr is our main and only project.

We live in Unterengadin, the most beautiful and probably the less expensive part of Switzerland. We don’t need car, tv, mobile phones and similar « consumer goods », so Hikr' budget, composed of our living costs and a little bit of computer infrastructure, is very small. However it’s not easy to find the money for a non-profit and non-commercial project like this one. Our sources of funding are sponsors, Pro-users, ads, donations and, last but not least, our own pocket.

You can contact the hikr team by email: admin@hikr.org or by internal private message.
 

Yes, you can! The collection of all hikr.org logos and buttons is available here.

We also have stickers to give, look here. On the same page you will find our "Google Gadget" with the top photos of the moment that you can put on your homepage or your iGoogle.  

 

Hikr.org is about reports. Report is a description of an outdoor tour (hiking, climbing, mountaineering, ski-tour, via-ferrata and snowshoe). People write them to keep memories and to share experiences. Usually, people write about the route, conditions, difficulties, experiences, impressions and any other things that happen during the tour; provide useful information and advices for those who might want to do the same tour. More info is better!

Hikr is like a huge guidebook for various mountain activities. But not exactly. Usually, guidebooks contains short pieces of information. Hikr.org contains subjective and personal impressions. Information is also here, but it’s more « live ». There is no editors and no verifications, but you can interact with the author of a report and you can contribute too.

Hikr reports are almost always illustrated with photos, sometimes accompanied with GPS tracks or KML files. Structured information like region, difficulty or date are attached to reports, this way it become easy to classify and search. For example, if you are interested in moderately difficult ski-tours in Graubünden you can easily find them by browsing the corresponding region and activity.


Hike-Partners & Hikr-Friends
Hikr is a community website online and also a community in the real world. When few users do the tour together they all can be listed  as hike-partners, so the report will appear on personal tour journals of all those people. Some users of hikr.org didnt’t wrote any reports, but their personal journals are many pages long !

A related feature is called « Friends ». When you want to track someone’s reports you can add this person to your friend-list. This way all reports where this person appears as a partner will be listed on a special page in your personal website on hikr.

Waypoints
A number of waypoints can be attached to a report. It’s highly recommended to attach as least one waypoint, because otherwise your report will not appear on the map and in the « related reports » box. Attaching a waypoint is easy, because thousands of points – peaks, huts, villages, passes, climbing routes and others – are already in the our database, you only need to search. You can also add new points, by providing name, height and coordinates.
 

Even if photos can be only uploaded with reports, they are a very important part of this website. Each user has a personal photo gallery and there is a common gallery of the website. Photos can be organized in different ways, shared in communities and submitted to photo contests. Best photos are promoted using  the democratic "favorites" feature. Photos are very important to us, we don't make economies on storage or bandwidth, we keep all originals and store reduced versions with the maximum quality.
 

Favorite photos
When you like a photo, you can add it to your favorites. There is a button “Add to favorites” on the right of the photo. If you change your mind you can remove the photo from your favorites later. The author of the photo can also remove your fav. All people that favorited a photo are listed on the right side of the photo page. Each user has a gallery of his/her/theirs/its favorite photos.

Photo rankings

The favorites feature allows to promote interesting photos. Various rankings can be seen on the photo portal:

• "Popular photos" are those that have more favorites;
• "Hot photos" are those that were recently added to favorites by many people;
• "Last favs" : ditto.

All those rankings are also available in personal, waypoint and community galleries. Rankings can be combined with tags.

Another interesting possibility to browse photos is by last comment date. This way you can use the photo galleries like a forum.

Photos of the week
Every Thursday the hottest photos of the previous week are automatically selected and included in our weekly newsletter.

 

Photo tags
A “tag” is an arbitrary keyword like “animals”, “clouds”, “flowers”, “people” or any other word that you associate to a photo. This is a way to organize your gallery. To add tags use “Add tag” button on the right of the photo. In the gallery choose a tag and see all related photos. All galleries - personal and common - can be browsed using tags.
 

Add place
You can attach one of more places (waypoints: summit, locality,..) to any of your photos, to say what is represented on the picture. Much often people use this to say what peaks are on the picture. All photos associated to a point end up on the point “homepage”

Userpics
Any of your photos can be used like userpic: a liitle image that represents you on hikr.
 

Waypoints are geographical locations, like peaks, huts, localities, climbing routes, passes or others. Hikr   have a database of many thousands of waypoints. You can add waypoints to your reports to indicate places you visited and to your photos to indicate what’s shown on the picture. There is a common map that shows all waypoints, personnal map for each user, a common directory, where you can search for a waypoint by name, and a personal directory of each user too. Each waypoint has a "homepage" with reports journal and gallery. A detailed documentation about waypoints is available here.
 

A community is a place which is dedicated to a particular subject. It contains a forum, a list of tours and a picture gallery. The subjects are for example: ski tours, safety in the mountains, photography, etc. The complete list of hikr.org communities can be found here. A detailed documentation about communities is here.

Photo contests are user-powered: every hikr user can launch and participate in the thematic photo contests. A list of currently running contests is shown on the hikr homeage and in the newsletter. All contests – running and finished – are listed on the contest portal. A detailed documentation about photo contests is available here.

On hikr.org each user has a personal website that contains all their contributions. There is a customizable homepage, a journal of reports, a photo gallery, a list of waypoints and a map. Moreover, there is a gallery of user’s favorite photos and a journal of friend’s reports.  The website has a personal address like www.anna.hikr.org.

Customizable homepage
Each new user of hikr.org has a standard homepage with last reports, last photos and a list of summits.  This page appears empty until you publish your first report. The personnal homepage  can be  customized using a easy visual editor. You can set up the title, provide contact information, write about you and choose which informations to present to your visitors and in which order. Take a look at our  active users homepages to see different customizations.

Counters
Each report and each photo have a simple counter that counts how much times the page was shown. It doesn't count search engines and other bots, only people. Pro users can also install an external couter to have a detailed reports of their visitors.
 

Lists are very simple way to bookmark interesting pages: reports, photos and waypoints. For example, one can build a list of interesting reports, or of places where he/she want to go. It’s just another more personal way to organize things. To add a page to a list, use “Save” button on the right bottom side of report, photo or waypoint pages.
 

Any hikr user can put comments on reports and photos of other users. Various journals of reports and photo galleries can be browsed by last comment date, so this is why Hikr is also like a big forum. Every time you receives a comment on your report, on your photo or an answer on your comment, you are notified by email. Finally, hikr comments are hierarchical.

 

In a perfect world Hikr would be free (and without advertising). In this world Hikr has two types of user accounts: Basic and Pro.

Every one who signs up receives a free Basic account with a monthly upload limit for photos. Paid Pro accounts are one of the ways to keep hikr.org running. Pro users are our sponsors. In exchange they have no upload limit and see no advertising. They also have some additional features and an attractive green rectangle labeled "Pro" near their name.

It's another, more private that comments, way to communicate with users that works like simple email. Each hikr user have a private mailbox to send and receive private messages (PM). To send the PM you can use a  button, "Send me a private message" that you find at each users homepage. Each time you receive a PM you are notified by email.

Interactive maps are used in many places on hikr.org. For example, each report that has waypoints has a "minimap" on the right side. This mini map shows the waypoints of the reports in red and the neighborhood in blue. User's have their personal maps with some customization options.

The main hikr map shows all waypoints associated to reports or to photos. There are many options, for example one can only show mountain huts higher than 3000m visited during the last year. Various tools are available: to measure distances and draw paths, to place photos on the map (geotagging), to edit existing waypoints and create new ones.

On all maps, clicking on a waypoint brings up a window with a list of its reports and photos.

A KML file for Google Earth with all waypoints is also available.