With 7.4 million people crammed into its 426 square miles, Hong Kong can be overwhelming to tourists. But now an app tells you exactly what to see—or, more precisely, what to photograph.

Scroll through Explorest to find a surfeit of futuristic high-rises, minimalist staircases, and rooftop views perfect for selfies. Clicking on the pic tells you how to capture it—not only the GPS coordinates for where to plant your feet, but also the exact settings to punch into your camera (in the unlikely event it’s not a smartphone).

"Two of the most common questions asked on social media are 'Where was this picture taken?' and 'How do I get there?'" says CEO Justin Myers. "We want to make traveling a more seamless, cultural experience using an extensive database of local knowledge."

But Explorest is just an app-shaped version of something tourists already do: flit from attraction to attraction to take the same photos they've already seen of Buckingham Palace, the Golden Gate Bridge or even Brussels' Peeing Boy. That script, staged again and again by countless visitors, reflects how photography has always shaped the travel experience—for good or bad.

“It can be an opening up to the world,” says Peter D. Osborne, the author of Photography and the Contemporary Cultural Condition, “or it can be forcing the world into your frame—as it were, almost literally.”

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The standardization of travel all started in the 18th century, as guidebooks began directing visitors to “picturesque” views that looked like paintings. They recorded them with the gadgets of the day: Claude glasses reflected tinted, fisheye scenes that were easy to sketch, while Camera Lucidas actually transposed them onto the page. Nifty as those tools were, they couldn't hold their own against the daguerreotype, a heavy wooden box camera introduced in 1839 that gentleman travelers soon began lugging to Greece and Egypt. But the early technology was still too cumbersome and time-consuming for most people, who just bought postcards.

Until Kodak. The introduction of George Eastman's lightweight, foolproof camera in 1888 meant hordes of tourists could quickly press a button to capture their individual experiences … which turned out to be more or less identical.

That’s because photographs actually created the attractions in the first place. As sociologist Dean MacCannell observed in his 1976 book The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, images lift unknown landscapes from obscurity, marking them as significant and “setting the tourist in motion on his journey to find the true object.”