Privacy-safe listing maps

How to show where a listing is without revealing the exact address, with one image URL.

Putting an exact pin on a rental, a private sale or a marketplace meetup tells everyone where someone lives. Most sites either drop the map, which hurts conversion, or blur it by hand. PinSharing's privacy area mode does it in the image itself.

A street map with a shaded circle around several blocks and no pin. — One image per grid cell: every address inside gets this same picture.

How it works

You send the real coordinates as area=lat,lng.
We snap them to a grid (about 1 km by default) and draw a circle around the grid point.
The circle is enlarged when needed so it always contains the real location.
No pin is drawn, and the real coordinates never appear in the image.

Because every address in a cell produces the identical image, nobody can work out the address by comparing several maps of the same listing.

Add it to a listing page

<img src="https://api.pinsharing.com/v1/static?area=41.6843,-88.3512&radius=800&size=640x300&scale=2&key=YOUR_KEY"
     width="640" height="300" alt="Approximate location of the listing">

If the real coordinates must never reach the browser, build this URL on your server, fetch the image once and serve your stored copy. On any paid plan you may keep it indefinitely.

Tune it

radius: the circle size in metres, 100 to 25,000. Bigger hides more.
snap: the grid in degrees, 0 to 0.1. 0.01 is about 1 km; 0.02 about 2 km.
color: the circle colour, as hex.

Try it

Type an address on the home page to see the image and the URL that makes it, or get a free key.