Location Photos and Regions
Add photos to a location, draw regions on them, and place items in those regions — so "where is it?" is answered by a picture of the actual shelf rather than a description of it.
Where to find it: the Photos tab when you edit a location, on the Inventory screen.
A location tells you an item is in Garage → Shelf A. A photo of Shelf A with a box drawn round the third bin along tells you exactly where to put your hand. That is the whole idea: for a workshop wall, a parts cabinet, or a storage unit, a picture carries information a name never can.
Photos are optional. If you never add one, nothing about locations changes.
ℹ️ Note Location photos are a capability you can switch off entirely. See Modular UI if you would rather not see them.
Open a location for editing and choose the Photos tab, then pick an image. Gubbins compresses it as it comes in — a full-resolution copy for viewing and a small thumbnail for lists — exactly as it does for item photos.
You can add several photos to one location: a wide shot of the whole wall, then close-ups of individual shelves.
Give each photo a caption if it helps ("left-hand cabinet", "under the bench").
A region is a named shape drawn on a photo — "Top shelf", "Drawer 2", "the bin behind the door". Open a photo and choose a shape:
| Shape | Best for |
|---|---|
| Rectangle | Shelves, drawers, boxes, most things |
| Circle | Round bins, jars, hooks, a single spot |
| Polygon | Awkward areas — a corner, an L-shaped shelf, anything not a neat box |
Draw by dragging on the photo (for a polygon, click each corner, then click the first point again to close it). Give the region a name, and optionally a colour so it stands out against the photo.
💡 Tip On a touchscreen, press and hold briefly before dragging to start drawing — a quick swipe still scrolls the page as usual.
💡 Tip You do not have to use the mouse at all. Every region is listed beside the photo with its own position and size fields, and the arrow keys nudge a selected region (hold Shift to resize it). Anything you can draw, you can also type.
Once a region exists, you can put items in it — and this is where regions earn their keep.
A region is a place, not a label on one item. Any number of items can share a region, and one item can be in more than one. So "the resistor kit and the solder spool are both on the top shelf" is exactly what you record, without drawing two overlapping boxes.
You can work from either end:
- From the photo — open a region and add items to it.
- From the item — an item's Where it sits section (on the Details tab when you edit an item) shows every region it sits in, each with a preview of the photo and the name of the location it belongs to.
Where it sits is not just a display — it is a full set of controls, so you never have to go hunting through a location's photos to correct where something lives:
- Place on a photo… opens a chooser. Pick a photo, then pick a region on it, and the item is placed there.
- Move takes the item out of one region and puts it in another — including a region on a different photo — in a single step.
- Remove takes the item off that photo. The item itself is untouched.
The chooser offers photos of the item's own location and of the locations above it, because a region is usually drawn on a picture of the containing place — you photograph the cabinet and mark out its drawers, rather than photographing every drawer.
ℹ️ Note The chooser only places items. Drawing, renaming, recolouring and deleting regions all stay in the location's photo editor, so the shapes have one home and one place to correct them.
ℹ️ Note Placing an item in a region does not move its stock. Regions describe where within a location something sits; the quantity in that location is still managed as described in Locations & stock.
- Removing an item from a region just unplaces it. The item is untouched.
- Deleting a region removes the shape and unplaces whatever was in it. No items are deleted.
- Deleting a photo removes its regions too, and unplaces their items. Again, no items are deleted.
⚠️ Heads-up The Erase photos options in Danger Zone cover location photos as well as item photos. There is a separate Location photos target if you want to clear only those.
Photos are the largest thing Gubbins stores, so they behave like item photos throughout:
- They count toward your storage usage, and appear in the Storage breakdown. If space runs short, Gubbins can drop full-resolution files and keep the thumbnails — see How your data is stored.
- They are included in backups.
- With Cloud sync on, the thumbnail, the regions and the item placements sync between your devices. The full-resolution file stays on the device that added it, so a photo may appear at lower quality on another device — the regions still line up correctly, because they are stored relative to the picture rather than in pixels.