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FriendTrack Help

Let your Group use an unpublished map

You have made a Map and you do not want it in the public catalog. You do want the four people you are going to the venue with to be able to use it.

There is nothing to do. One rule covers it:

A Map you have not published is readable by anybody who currently shares a Group with you.

Be in a Group with them, and they can use your Map. No invitation, no permission, no publishing, no review.

How they get to it

Once you are in a Group together:

  • Set the Map as your Current Map while you are sharing with that Group, and the app offers it to them by name with Install to see the same map view — install the map a friend is using.
  • Or they find it in their own list, where a Map shared this way is marked Shared.

The quickest route is the first: be in the Group, share, and pick the Map.

What this rule is, and is not

It is a rule about reading, and only about reading. It does not:

  • let them edit anything — that is a Collaborator, which is a deliberate per-person grant and needs Pro: let a colleague edit your map;
  • give the Group any claim on the Map. Maps belong to people, not to Groups. Nothing about your Map is stored on the Group, no Group owns it, and leaving the Group does not take a copy with anybody;
  • survive the Group. Access follows current Group membership: somebody who leaves, or is removed, loses access to your unpublished Map at the same moment.

That last point is the useful one. Access is exactly your Group membership, which means you manage it with the tool you already use — the Group.

Why it works this way

Maps and Groups are otherwise completely unrelated in FriendTrack: a Map is owned by one person, a Group is a set of people, and neither knows about the other. This one coupling — may they read it — is the single deliberate exception, and it exists because a team using a venue Map should not have to publish it to the world to do so.

It is also why a delisted map does not disappear for everybody

The same rule explains the commonest confusion in the whole set. When a published Map is taken out of the catalog it stops being publicly readable — and it stays readable for anybody who shares a Group with its owner. So two people at the same venue can see different things, and the one who can still open it is the one who knows the person who made it.

Both sides of that are written up:

One exception

A Map owned by an Organization rather than by a person is not covered: there is no person to share a Group with, so an unpublished Organization Map stays with its Org Admins. See maps owned by an Organization.