Frequently asked questions

MyIceland is a community-driven travel platform for Iceland. Every place was added by a real traveler, every photo was taken by someone who stood there. You can browse places, build trip itineraries, join discussions, and share your own photos and tips.

More than most people notice at first: every place page shows live weather, sunrise/sunset, and the aurora forecast for that exact spot; the trip builder estimates driving time and fuel cost from live Icelandic prices and your car settings; the AI planner drafts full itineraries around your taste; you can collect places and photos into Memories and share them; join Discussions with other travelers; download any trip as a PDF for the road; and if you run a place, you can claim your listing to manage it.

Yes — all of it. Browsing places, building trips, uploading photos, generating itineraries: free, with no subscription, no ads, and no card required. And rankings can never be bought — a place's position comes from community likes and activity, nothing else.

MyIceland doesn't take donations, outside funding, or 'buy me a coffee'-style tips — the best way to support it is to use it, add to it, and contribute to it. Browse and like the places you love, add ones that are missing, upload your own photos, and share them with other travelers. Spot a place description that reads off? Suggest a better one — many descriptions start as AI drafts and can occasionally be inaccurate, so community edits keep them honest. When you generate an AI trip, give it a thumbs up or down afterwards — that feedback helps the itineraries get better for everyone. And join the discussions, leave helpful comments, report anything off. Every real contribution makes the platform more useful for the next traveler. And if you'd rather put money toward Iceland itself, we'd point you to ICE-SAR (Icelandic Search and Rescue) — the volunteer teams who rescue lost and stranded travelers across the country, funded almost entirely by donations. They welcome support from anywhere in the world at icesar.com/en/support-us.

No — you can browse places, trips, memories, and discussions without signing in. You'll need a free account to add places, upload photos, build trips, comment, or like things.

Yes. Sign-in is passwordless — a one-time link sent to your email, or Sign in with Google or Apple — so there's no password to be stolen, reused, or leaked, and we never see or store one. You don't need a Google or Apple account to join — any email address works: we send you a one-time sign-in link to click (please check your spam folder if it doesn't land in your inbox). If you do choose Google or Apple, we request read-only access to just your name and email address, nothing more. And to be clear, email here means your email address (like you@gmail.com), used only to create your account and send your sign-in link — not permission to read your emails, contacts, files, or anything inside your Google or Apple account. We can't see any of that. And with Sign in with Apple, if you choose Apple's Hide My Email, we only ever receive Apple's private relay address — never your real email. We never sell your data or use it for advertising, our analytics are anonymous, and community photos and comments can be flagged and reviewed. The whole site runs over encrypted HTTPS.

Not yet — we plan to launch both this fall. In the meantime, the website is fully mobile-optimized and works in any modern browser, so it runs well on most phones.

MyIceland is in English for now — the shared language most visitors to Iceland read. Place names keep their original Icelandic spelling (Gullfoss stays Gullfoss). If you'd prefer another language, your browser's built-in 'Translate page' feature works well across the whole site. More languages may come later.

Not yet — MyIceland needs an internet connection, so there's no offline mode at the moment. Iceland has good mobile coverage along the Ring Road and main routes, but it can drop out in the highlands and remote areas. If you're heading somewhere without signal, download your trip as a PDF or take screenshots of the details you'll need before you go.

Enter your email on the sign-in page and we'll send you a sign-in link — no password needed. You can also sign in with Google or Apple. New accounts pick a username and avatar during a short onboarding.

First check your spam or promotions folder — the email comes from MyIceland. Each sign-in link expires one hour after it's sent and can only be used once, so if it's older than that (or you've already clicked it), just go back to the sign-in page and request a fresh one. Still stuck? Sign in with Google or Apple instead, or email support@myiceland.is.

Security is built in from the sign-in up. MyIceland is passwordless — you sign in with a one-time link sent to your email, or with Google or Apple — so we never create or store a password, and there's nothing to guess, reuse, or leak. When you use Google or Apple, we never see your password there either. We collect only the basics: your email and a username you choose (a display name, bio, and avatar are optional). Everything runs over encrypted connections (SSL/TLS) with server-side checks on every action, we don't sell your data, and there are no ads. Found a security issue? Email security@myiceland.is.

Read our Privacy Policy →

Usernames are 3–20 characters: lowercase letters, numbers, and underscores. Business names belong to their owners — a business gets its name by claiming its listing, even if someone else registered it first.

No — usernames are permanent, so pick one you'll be happy with during onboarding. The one exception goes the other way: we may change a username ourselves if it's inappropriate, or if it matches a real business or legal entity — business names belong to their owners through the claiming process.

A display name, a short bio, an avatar (upload a photo or pick an emoji and color), your website, and your country. You manage all of it in Settings.

Profiles are public by default so other travelers can see your places, trips, and photos. You can switch to a private profile anytime in Settings → Privacy, which hides your activity from other users.

Let your activity build your presence. Add the places you've actually been and upload your own photos, put together polished public trips others can copy, collect your best shots into Memories to share, and join other travelers' trips and discussions with genuinely helpful comments. Your username appears on everything you contribute, and your profile can link to your own website — so the more you share, the more people discover your work and find their way to you.

You get in-app notifications — the bell icon — when people interact with your content or your submissions are reviewed. For example: someone mentions you in a comment; likes your place, photo, or comment; or comments on your trip; a photo or place you added gets verified; your photo is chosen as a place's cover; a description you suggested is approved; or your content hits a milestone. Open the bell to catch up — we don't spam your email. Prefer fewer? You can turn off any notification type — or mute all of them — in Settings.

Go to your profile, then pick the right tab: photos you've uploaded are under Contributions, and your comments are under Comments. Click the ✕ next to the one you want to remove and confirm. You can also delete a comment right where it appears — tap the ⋯ menu on the comment and choose Delete.

In Settings, open the Danger zone and confirm by typing DELETE. We'll email you a confirmation link (it expires in 1 hour). Deletion permanently removes your profile, comments, trips, likes, and notifications. Photos and places you contributed remain on the platform, shown as anonymous — if you'd rather your photos not stay up, delete them before deleting your account. This cannot be undone.

@anonymous isn't a real person — it's where contributions from deleted accounts live. When someone deletes their account, we keep the places and photos they added (so the platform stays complete for everyone) but strip the link back to them, reassigning that content to @anonymous. So if you see a place or photo credited to @anonymous, it was added by someone who has since left and chosen to be forgotten.

Everything a traveler needs: waterfalls, geothermal areas, glaciers, hiking trails, lagoons, beaches, volcanoes, canyons, caves, viewpoints, wildlife spots — plus hotels, restaurants, cafés, campsites, swimming pools, museums, churches, towns, ice cream shops, souvenir shops, guides, rental cars, and photographers.

Sign in and hit Add a place. Search for the location so it lands on the map correctly — we auto-detect the type and region, and draft a description you can edit or replace. Add a photo if you have one (it must be your own). Your place goes live immediately, and an admin later reviews it and adds a ✓ once verified.

Your place is live the moment you add it — it appears on the map right away. On the home page, the Verified filter is on by default, so it only shows places an admin has reviewed and given the ✓ badge. Switch the Verified filter off and your new place shows up immediately. Once an admin verifies it, it appears with the filter on too.

You add a place by searching for it by name, and its coordinates come from a trusted map database — not from a pin you drop or numbers you type. That keeps every place a real, findable location, so the map stays accurate and free of made-up or misplaced pins. And if a place isn't in the map databases yet, you can still add it with the "Can't find it? Add it anyway" button — an admin maps its exact location later.

MyIceland's place search now looks across two map sources at once — OpenStreetMap (a free, community-maintained world map) and Apple Maps — so most places, including many businesses, show up as you type. If something still isn't there (very new or very small spots sometimes aren't in either yet), you don't have to settle for a nearby point: use the "Can't find it? Add it anyway" button under the search box. Type the name, add your photo and details, and submit — an admin maps its exact location afterward and credits you as the finder.

MyIceland searches two map sources together — OpenStreetMap and Apple Maps — so most places appear as you type. If yours still doesn't (common for brand-new or very small spots), tap the "Can't find it? Add it anyway" button beneath the search box: enter the name, add your photo and details, and submit. The place goes live with the name you gave, an admin pins its exact location later, and you're credited as the finder — no need to pick a nearby point anymore.

Open the place and tap the Share button — it copies a short, descriptive link (like myiceland.is/places/skogafoss) to your clipboard. Paste it into any message, email, or app to send it over. The link uses the place's name so your friend can tell what it is before they even tap, and anyone can open it — no account needed. Trips and Memories have the same Share button.

It means a real person on our team has checked the place and confirmed it exists and its details are accurate. Every submission first runs through automated checks — including machine-learning algorithms that scan uploaded photos for inappropriate content — to catch spam and bad content. But even good models miss things, and they can't tell whether a place is genuinely real or correctly described, so an admin reviews each one before adding the ✓. So a ✓ means a human confirmed it's the real thing, not just that it slipped past an automated filter.

Liking saves a place to your wishlist — the places you want to see — and it teaches the AI trip planner your taste. Visited is your travel log — the places you've actually been — which the planner can leave out so it suggests new spots. Both live on your My Places page.

For any place with a location, we show live conditions right on the page: the current temperature, wind, and sky, that day's sunrise and sunset times, and the aurora forecast — the Kp index and how likely the northern lights are. It refreshes through the day, so it's a quick way to judge whether to go now or wait for clearer skies or a stronger aurora.

Kp is a 0–9 scale of geomagnetic activity — the higher it is, the brighter and further south the northern lights can reach. As a rough guide for Iceland: 0–2 is quiet (a faint glow at most, and only if skies are dark and clear), 3–4 is a good show on a clear night, and 5 or higher is strong — a geomagnetic storm with bright, active aurora. We translate the number into plain language on each place page (for example, "Strong aurora likely (Kp 5.7)") so you don't have to memorize the scale. Two things the Kp can't tell you: you still need dark, clear skies to see anything, and the forecast shifts through the day — so check it close to when you actually plan to go out.

Signed-in users rate places 1–5 stars, one rating per person. Tap your current star again to remove your rating. The place shows the average and the number of ratings.

A view is just how many times a place's page has been opened, and we can't control who opens it. Every place page is public, so it gets indexed by search engines, shared in links, and hit by crawlers — views pile up from all over the internet, not only from people browsing MyIceland. That's why sorting by Most viewed can push up a place that happens to get a lot of outside traffic, even if the community hasn't fallen for it. That's exactly why there are three ways to sort. Most liked is the community's pick: only signed-in members can like a place, so it reflects what real people who use MyIceland actually rate highly — the most trustworthy 'best of'. Most viewed is raw traffic — it counts every visit from anywhere, so it shows what's getting attention, not necessarily what's best. Most recent shows the newest places added (that have a photo), for discovering fresh finds. Tip: for genuine local and community favorites, sort by Most liked.

By the community. The Services tabs order listings by likes — most-liked first, with views breaking ties — and rankings update once a day. Placement can never be bought.

Stays — apartments and homes rented directly by local hosts — are only visible to signed-in users. Hosts are sharing their own homes and personal photos, so we keep those listings behind a sign-in to protect their privacy and to stop bots and scrapers from harvesting the images. Create a free account and the Stays tab appears under Services → Accommodation.

Place descriptions often start as AI-generated drafts, so once in a while a detail can be inaccurate. If the description is off, use the 'Suggest a better description' option on the place page — an admin reviews your suggestion and you're notified if it's used. For anything else, use the contact form or email us. And if it's your business, claim the listing to manage the details yourself.

You can always improve the description — use 'Suggest a better description' on the place page, and an admin reviews the change. The core details (name and location) come from a trusted map database rather than free text, so they stay fixed to keep the map accurate. If the place is your business, claim the listing to manage its details, website, and booking link yourself.

JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, AVIF, and TIFF all work — photos are compressed automatically in your browser before upload, so big files are fine. The one rule: it must be your own photo, and you confirm that on every upload.

Not yet — for now, photos are added one at a time. We know that's not ideal, and multi-photo upload is actively in the works. In the meantime you can still add as many photos to a place as you like — just upload them one after another.

To respect copyright, we only show photos that community members took themselves or that a business has explicitly given us the rights to use — we never pull images from around the web. That means newer or lesser-known businesses can start out with few photos, or none. We're actively reaching out to businesses about MyIceland so they can add their own, and travelers add photos from their visits over time — so coverage keeps growing.

Not yet — MyIceland is photos-only for now.

It appears immediately. Shortly after, a machine-learning content check reviews every upload — photos that violate the content guidelines are removed and you get a notification. Repeated violations will restrict an account.

A photo can come down for a few reasons: automated moderation (every upload is scanned for inappropriate content) flagged it, the community flagged it and a moderator agreed, or it was a duplicate of a photo already on that place. Verified photos are protected from flag abuse. If you think a photo was removed by mistake, email support@myiceland.is and we'll take a look.

It means the photo is verified — confirmed as a genuine photo of that place, so it's trusted (and protected from flag abuse). A separate green 'GPS' badge means the photo's own embedded location data matched the place — proof it was taken right there. They're independent signals, so a photo can show both.

The GPS badge needs the photo's own embedded location, and three things have to line up: the photo actually has GPS saved in it, that location is close to the place, and we can read it. Photos taken straight from your camera with Location switched on usually have it — but screenshots, edited or re-saved copies, and photos shared through apps like WhatsApp, Messages, or AirDrop have their location stripped out, so those can't be GPS-verified even if you were standing right there. It's checked per photo, so it's normal for some of your uploads to show the badge and others not. (The place itself, and the photo, can still be verified separately.)

Yes — your username is shown with your photos, and if your photo becomes a place's cover image you're credited on the page and notified.

Open its menu and flag it — anyone can, and it genuinely helps: community flags are how we catch what automated checks and reviews miss. Content that clears the automated checks but gets multiple flags is looked at by an admin. (Brand-new accounts need a little activity first, to prevent flag abuse.)

Add places to a trip, organize them into days, reorder them, and attach notes. MyIceland calculates driving time per day and estimates fuel cost using live Icelandic fuel prices. In Settings you can set your car size, fuel type (petrol, diesel, or electric), driving season, distance unit (km or miles), and currency — the driving times, fuel estimate, and cost totals all update to match.

Each day's total includes the drive to get there. The leg from the last stop of one day to the first stop of the next is counted in the next day — so Day 2 assumes you start where Day 1 ended, Day 3 where Day 2 ended, and so on. That way the per-day driving times always add up to the trip's grand total, with nothing double-counted or left out.

Describe the trip you want — dates, interests, pace — and MyIceland drafts a full itinerary from real places on the platform. Itineraries are built from attractions and activities — waterfalls, sights, hikes, towns and the like — not hotels or guides (hotels appear as nearby places on the trip itself, and guides live under Services). Two options (both on by default) tailor it to you: it uses the places you've liked to match your taste, and it leaves out places you've marked visited so you get new ones. Want a clean slate? A 'Surprise me' toggle turns both off for an unbiased trip. You can generate up to 3 trips per day, free.

AI itineraries focus on what to see and do, so your day plan isn't cluttered with where to sleep. Hotels near each stop are shown as nearby places when you view the trip, and you can browse guides and tour operators any time under Services. That keeps the itinerary about the experience while accommodation stays a separate, easy choice.

The generator learns from your activity, so the more you tell it, the better it gets. Like the places that appeal to you — it picks up your favorite place types and regions from what you like and rate, then builds the itinerary around that taste, mixing in a few new ones for variety. Mark the places you've already been as visited and they're left out, so every suggestion is somewhere new. In your prompt, be specific: how many days, your pace, what you're into (waterfalls, hot springs, hiking), and where you're based. Prefer a blank slate? Turn on 'Surprise me' to ignore your likes and visits for a fully unbiased trip.

The limit resets on its own — 3 generations refresh each day, all free. There's no way to raise it right now; it simply refreshes, so you get a fresh batch every day.

Browse Explore Trips — public itineraries other travelers have built and shared. They're a great starting point if you don't know where to go or what to write: open one for ideas, or copy it straight into your own trips and tweak it from there.

Browse Explore Trips →

Yes — every trip has a short share link you can copy. Make a trip public and it also appears on Explore Trips with its own page, where others can comment on it or copy it as a starting point for their own trip. Private trips are only visible to you. One thing to know: making a trip public shows your notes too, so keep private details out of them — if a note looks like it contains something sensitive (a booking number, for example), we'll warn you before the trip goes public.

There's no live co-editing yet, but there's an easy workaround: make your trip public and your travel partner can copy it into their own trips, make changes, make their version public, and send it back to you. Pass it back and forth that way until it's right — and you each keep your own copy.

Yes — make your trip public and turn on the 'Feedback' toggle. It then appears on the 'Trips requesting feedback' list (linked from Explore Trips), where the community can leave comments and suggestions to help you improve it. Turn the toggle off anytime, or make the trip private, to stop requesting feedback.

Yes — trips download as a nicely formatted PDF, handy for offline use on the road.

Open the trip you want to remove and click Edit trip. Scroll down and you'll find a Delete trip button — click it, then confirm. This permanently removes the trip.

Memories are curated collections of your favorite Iceland photos — like a digital photo album. Keep them private, or make them public to share with a link. Public memories appear on Explore Memories.

Seasonal community pages about the things people come to Iceland for — northern lights, puffin season, ice caves, whale watching, F-road season, and more. Share photos, tips, and questions with other travelers.

Yes — type @username in any comment to mention someone (up to 5 per comment). They get a notification, and you can turn mention notifications off in Settings.

Yes — hotels, guides, rental cars, photographers, lagoons, restaurants, cafés, souvenir shops, swimming pools, campsites, and museums can all be claimed by their owners.

Claiming is free too — it's about control and accuracy, not payment. Your place can already be on MyIceland whether or not you claim it, added and described by the community. Claiming simply puts you, the real owner, in charge of it: you keep the description, website, photos, and a direct booking or contact link correct and current, and travelers see a verified-owner badge so they know the details come from you, not a guess. What claiming never does is buy you ranking or placement — a listing's position always comes from community likes and can't be paid for. So it isn't an upsell; it's just how a business takes ownership of its own information on a platform that stays free for everyone.

Open your place's page and tap “Is this your business?”. Enter your business email and we give you an 8-character claim code. Send an email from that business address to verify@myiceland.is with the code in the subject line — we verify within 24 hours. No account is needed to start a claim.

The @username of your business name, a verified owner badge, and control of your listing — description, website, photos, and booking link. Travelers see the listing is managed by the real owner.

You still get it. Your business's name belongs to your business — when you claim and verify ownership, we make sure the matching @username is yours, even if someone else registered it first. Claiming guarantees your official handle.

Yes — add it like any place (or ask us to), then claim it. Direct is the whole point: travelers on MyIceland book with you, not through middlemen.

We're always looking for smart, talented people who love Iceland — content creators, marketers, engineers. Send your resume, or just a few lines about who you are and what you'd like to do together, to join@myiceland.is.

Use the contact form on the Contact page, or email hello@myiceland.is. For business claims, use verify@myiceland.is as described above.

No problem — you can always email us any time at hello@myiceland.is, and we'll help with anything the FAQ doesn't cover.

See our Good to Know page — driving, rental cars, money, weather, and the local customs worth knowing before you land.

Open Good to Know →