New cities now announced in the timeline

When a city joins Street Art Cities, it’s a milestone, but until now, it quietly happened in the background. Thanks to a suggestion from the community, that moment is finally getting the spotlight it deserves.

From today on, whenever a city receives its first-ever artwork, the SAC account will automatically post an announcement in the timeline:

“Milan in Italy just joined Street Art Cities, with the first artwork added by hunter X. Welcome!”

The post includes the artwork itself and appears not only in the global feed, but also in the city and country feeds. It’s a simple change with a big impact: new cities feel celebrated, contributors get recognition, and the map feels more dynamic as it grows.

This feature is rolling out gradually over the next few days.

New tools for managing comments

Community conversations can be lively, helpful, and occasionally… messy. Two new tools help keep discussions clear and relevant.

✔️ Resolving Comments

Some comments are meant to stay forever; others are temporary notes (“I’ll fix this later”, “Check this location”, etc.).
You can now mark comments as resolved on the website. Resolved comments collapse into a smaller view, still visible, but no longer cluttering the conversation.

Hunters marking comments as resolved in their dashboard will see the same status reflected on the website.
A small but mighty improvement.

✏️ Editing Comments

Typos happen.
Now, both comment creators and admins can edit comments without deleting and reposting them. Edited comments show an “edited” indicator, keeping things transparent while reducing friction.

These tools will also arrive in the mobile app soon.

Unified search for artworks, places & more

Search just became dramatically more powerful.

Until recently, the search bar only covered cities, artists, hunters, tags, and events. Artworks and places were missing, which made it harder to check if something already existed on the map.

That gap is now closed.

You can now search across all major content types:

• Artworks

• Places

• Cities

• Artists

• Hunters

• Tags

• Events

This unified search makes it far easier to verify whether an artwork is already listed — especially when searching by title or description.

SAC mobile app 4.9.0 arriving this week

The next app update brings a mix of new tools, fixes, and quality-of-life improvements:

• A new system for flagging inappropriate content

• Comment edit and resolve tools

• Searching for markers in the Explore view

• Better sharing buttons (with correct Android icons)

• Related markers shown on artwork detail pages

• A persistent “Show places more prominently” map option

• Fixed hidden Edit button on removed artworks

• Fixed navigation bug when jumping between artworks

A solid update that makes the app smoother, clearer, and more consistent with the website.

A more connected, more manageable, more discoverable platform

These updates share a common thread: visibility, clarity, and ease of use.

• New cities get celebrated.

• Comments become easier to manage.

• Search becomes a true all-in-one discovery tool.

• The app gets smarter and more reliable.

Street Art Cities keeps growing, not just in artworks, but in the tools that help the community map the world’s creativity.

Here’s everything that’s new, and how it all fits together.

A major expansion of edits & community contributions

Last month we introduced the ability to suggest new artworks and edits directly from the app and website. This month, that system has grown dramatically.

You can now suggest edits for:

• Artwork locations

• Artwork status

• Artist bios

• Tag merges

• Missing titles, dates, and more

This means hunters can help fill in gaps that previously required admin intervention. And speaking of gaps, we’ve launched a new Fill the Gaps page listing all artworks worldwide missing artists, titles, or creation dates. It’s a treasure map for detectives.

You can also suggest additional tags for artworks and artists, which helps us build richer collections, like all artworks containing flowers, portraits, animals, or specific techniques.

If you want to dive deeper into detective work, explore style recognition or artist search tips.

Introducing Super Hunters

This is the biggest community update of the year.

Super Hunters are trusted, long‑time contributors who now have platform‑wide edit rights. Their edits and new artwork suggestions are auto‑approved, no matter the city. They also get a special profile decoration so you can spot them instantly in the feed and in Community Notes.

In the early days, locking growth on a per‑city basis made perfect sense. We looked at some of our colleagues, who had been at it longer. Their models allowed anyone to upload anything, anywhere in the world and they struggled with quality and duplicates. Sadly, most of them are no longer active.

We chose a different path:
A hunter should have a deep connection to the city they hunt in.
That connection improves quality, reduces duplicates, and speeds up hunting.

Now, almost ten years later, we can confidently say the basics are solid:

• Passionate experts

• Powerful facilitating tech

• The right community attitude

Super Hunters are the natural next step.

Better Search & a More Reliable Mobile Map

The mobile app has received a major upgrade:

• More consistent marker loading

• Better zooming and clustering (now matches the website)

• Faster search

• New search filters by type

• A new Everything feed showing real‑time activity across the platform

These changes make it easier to explore art across cities, countries, and continents and to keep up with what’s happening globally.

Making the Website More Social

For years, the mobile app had social features the website lacked. That gap is now closed.

You can now:

• Follow users

• Leave comments

• Switch between different feed types

This brings the website in line with the app and makes community interaction smoother across devices.

Other new features

A few more upgrades worth celebrating:

• 💬 Message button on profiles: making it easier to connect with other hunters

• ⌚️ Apple Watch app: find the nearest artwork instantly

• 🔖 Artist tags: visible on both app and website, with the ability to suggest new ones

• 📥 Embeddable markers: share artwork previews on your own website

These small improvements add up to a more connected, more discoverable, more community‑driven platform.

A stronger global map, built together

Street Art Cities keeps growing, in artworks, in contributors, and in ambition. The expanded edit tools empower everyone. The social features connect us. The improved mobile map helps explorers. And Super Hunters help keep everything accurate as the platform scales.

But ambition needs support.

Searching for more Official Partners

We currently have 15 official Street Art Cities partner cities. These partners:

• Get featured prominently in the app and on the website

• Receive tools to discover artists and explore city‑specific statistics

• Get personal guidance from our team on their street art strategy

  

Partnerships — along with our Supporters program — are how we fund the platform. As SAC grows, we need the number of partners to grow with us.

If you have contacts at your city municipality, you can help.
Check out how to reach out to your city and help us expand the network.

Read our whitepaper for more inspiration on how we finally unlocked the impact of urban art.

Back in April, we introduced a major shift in how people can contribute to Street Art Cities: regular app users can now suggest new artworks directly from the app.

That update opened the door for anyone, not just hunters, to help map what they discover on the streets. Since that implementation we’ve received over 100 new suggestions.

Today, we’re building on that momentum with a set of powerful new tools that make community contributions even easier and more flexible.

A unified, more powerful edit‑suggestion system

Street art evolves quickly, and keeping the map accurate requires many eyes, not just a few. With our latest update, you can now suggest a wide range of edits directly from the Street Art Cities website, all from one streamlined workflow.

Here’s what you can now suggest:

• Descriptions: Write or update descriptions using our rich text editor, complete with bold, italics, links, and lists.

• Creation dates: Add or correct when an artwork was created.

• Titles, artists, tags, and city: All existing fields remain available for refinement.

• Move or merge artworks: Fix misplaced markers or help clean up duplicates.

You’ll find these options under the More (•••) menu on any artwork or place marker page.

If you already have edit access, for example, as a hunter or country manager, your changes are accepted instantly. Otherwise, your suggestions go into a review queue. For now, our admin team handles approvals, but hunters will soon be able to review and accept submissions directly.

Opening the door to more c ontributors

These new edit‑suggestion tools build on the foundation we set earlier this year with the Suggest an Artwork feature and they answer a very real need we’ve heard from the community. Many seasoned travelers, street art enthusiasts, and long‑time app users want to help improve the map, but aren’t ready (or don’t have the time) to take on the full responsibility of becoming a certified Street Art Cities hunter.

Now they don’t have to.

This update gives them meaningful ways to contribute without needing special permissions, while also giving us a clearer picture of who might be a great future hunter. It’s a natural way to spot engaged, detail‑oriented contributors before inviting them into a more official role.

The result is a more open, collaborative ecosystem where:

• Hunters receive better, more complete information

• Visitors can help shape the map in ways that matter

• The global street art map becomes more accurate, more detailed, and more alive

What’s Next

We’re not stopping here. Coming soon:

• Edit suggestions for artists

• Edit suggestions for cities

• Updates to the mobile app to bring these new tools to your phone

Exploring street art has always been about curiosity, wandering, and stumbling into the unexpected. Today, it becomes something more: rewarding and addictive.

After months of building and testing, three new gamification features are officially live in the Street Art Cities app, designed to celebrate the way you explore, discover, and return to the streets again and again.

These features form the first layer of a larger research project by our DEV intern Noa Heutz, and they’re already reshaping how exploration feels inside the app.

Exploration progress

Track your journey city by city, and country by country.

Open Explore → Exploration and you’ll see a new compass icon🧭.

Tap it to view how many artworks you’ve marked as seen in each city and how far you’ve progressed across entire countries.

Whether you’re casually browsing or on a mission to complete a city, this gives your exploration a sense of direction and momentum.

Daily streaks

Consistency now counts, and it unlocks rewards.

We’ve actually been experimenting with badges for a while now, think of the hunter meetup badges, those early prototypes that rewarded community moments rather than exploration alone. Today’s update builds on that foundation and brings badges into the core of the app experience.

Mark at least one artwork as seen each day to build your streak.
Hit milestones at 7, 30, 90, and 365 days to earn streak badges that appear on your profile.

It’s a simple mechanic with a powerful effect: it turns everyday wandering into a habit.

New badges

A growing badge system celebrates your milestones — big and small.

You can now unlock badges for:

• First Discovery: your very first artwork

• Explorer 100: 100 artworks discovered

• Globetrotter 10: exploring 10 different cities

• City Complete: seeing every artwork in a city

• Country Pioneer / Settler / Conqueror: reaching 25%, 50%, or 75% of a country

• Streak Badges: for 7, 30, 90, and 365 days of daily exploration

All badges live on your profile under Achievements, giving your journey a visual identity.

Why this exists, and what comes next

These features are the foundation of Noa’s graduation project, a research‑driven exploration of how to make digital street art discovery more meaningful, playful, and community‑driven.

The work doesn’t stop here.
The research also explores:

• collaborative discoveries

• narrative routes

• quest‑style exploration

• shared challenges

• new ways to reward community contributions

Not all of these ideas made it into this release, but your feedback will determine which ones evolve into the next layer of the app.

Your feedback shapes the future

As always our community spirit prevails, so there’s a short feedback form linked inside the Exploration view, or you can open it directly from the app.

It takes about five minutes, and your input helps validate the design as part of Noa’s thesis.
Positive, negative, suggestions, bugs, everything is welcome.

These moments are the heartbeat of the culture, and now they finally have a home on Street Art Cities.

With our Events feature, the global street art community can finally discover what’s happening, where it’s happening, and how to be part of it.

One place for everything happening in the streets

Head to the Events page and you’ll find a clean, intuitive overview of what’s going on around the world.

You can easily toggle between Ongoing and Upcoming events, whether you’re looking for something to join today or planning your next trip.

No more scattered announcements.
No more missing out because you didn’t follow the right account at the right moment.
Everything is in one place, open to everyone.

The community can now add events too

Street Art Cities has always been built by its community: hunters, explorers, artists, locals, travelers.
So opening up events to the community was the natural next step.

If you know about something happening in your city, a festival, a mural unveiling, a workshop, a gallery night, a jam, you can now add it directly to the platform.

Fill in the details, upload a photo if you have one, and submit.
To keep the list trustworthy and relevant, every event is reviewed before approval. Once it’s cleared, it goes live for the whole world to see.

This keeps the map clean, credible, and genuinely useful.

Where moments become part of the ecosystem

Street art is one of the most democratic art forms in the world. But the culture around it, the gatherings, the celebrations, the shared experiences, often disappears as quickly as it appears.

By mapping events, we’re not just documenting walls.
We’re documenting the life around them.

And that only works if the community participates.

So if you’re organizing something , or simply know about an event others shouldn’t miss, add it. Share it. Help someone discover a moment they wouldn’t have found otherwise.

Until now, those visitors couldn’t directly contribute to the map unless they were hunters themselves.

Today, that changes.

We’re excited to introduce a long‑awaited feature that finally opens the door for regular app users to help document new artworks: you can now suggest an artwork directly from the Street Art Cities app.

This is a big step toward making the platform more collaborative, more responsive, and more reflective of what’s happening on the streets in real time.

How it works

1. Spot something new? Suggest it.
Visitors can now submit a suggestion straight from the app. All it takes is:

• a photo

• a location
  Optional fields like artist name or extra details can be added if known.

2. Hunters get a ready‑to‑use draft.
Each suggestion appears as a community note in the local hunter’s dashboard. From there, hunters can instantly turn it into a draft artwork, already pre‑filled with the visitor’s info.

3. Visitors stay in the loop.
Once the artwork goes live, the original suggester receives a notification. Their contribution becomes part of the global street art map.

Power to the community

Street art is fast, fluid, and constantly evolving. Hunters do incredible work, but they can’t be everywhere at once. With this feature, anyone can help keep the map up to date, even if they’re just passing through a city for a day.

This strengthens the entire ecosystem:

• Hunters get better intel.

• Visitors feel more involved.

• The map becomes more complete, more accurate, and more alive.

A huge thank‑you to everyone who contributed ideas and feedback during the original feature discussion. Your input shaped this.

Street Art Cities grows stronger every time someone shares what they’ve discovered. This new feature makes that easier than ever, and we can’t wait to see what the community uncovers next.

Street art is one of the fastest‑moving cultural ecosystems in the world. Walls change overnight, artists travel constantly, and entire neighbourhoods can transform in a single season. What makes it exciting is also what makes it hard to follow: unless you’re out there every day, you miss things. And even if you are out there every day, you still miss things. That’s the reason the Street Art Cities exists. It’s not just a map or a directory, it’s a living ecosystem built by a global community of hunters, photographers, artists, and explorers who care about documenting this culture as it evolves. Every update we release, big or small, is meant to make that shared archive easier to navigate and more meaningful to use.

A small app update with big quality-of-life improvement

Today we’re rolling out app version 4.5.2, a compact update packed with a few highly requested features that make discovering, researching, and enjoying murals smoother than ever.

A TIMELINE for every wall

One of the most-loved features on the web is now fully available in the app: the wall TIMELINE.

Every wall has a story. Artists come and go, pieces get refreshed, buffed, reborn. With the new timeline view, you can now scroll back through the history of a wall and see all previous artworks that lived there. It’s a simple way to understand the evolution of a spot—and a beautiful reminder that street art is a living, breathing medium.

Artist pages now come with a global mapview

We’ve added a Map button to every artist page. Tap it, and you’ll instantly see a world map with all artworks by that artist.

Whether you’re planning a trip, researching an artist’s footprint, or just curious how far their work travels, this gives you a fast, visual overview of their global presence.

And because context matters:
When you open an artist page from within a city page, you can now choose whether you want to see:

• Only the artworks in that city, or

• All artworks worldwide

A small detail, but one that makes navigating between local and global views much more intuitive.

Artwork SEEN counts are now visible

Transparency is important, and many of you asked for this: the number of times an artwork has been 👀 is now displayed at the top of the artwork detail page.

It’s a fun metric, but also a meaningful one, showing which pieces resonate, which walls attract attention, and how the community interacts with the map. So don’t hesitate to push that ‘SEEN’ button when using the app.

Why these updates?

Each of these features is small on its own, but together they make the app feel more alive, more informative, and more connected to the way people actually explore street art.

• The timeline honors the past.

• The artist map opens up the world.

• The view count adds a layer of community insight.

Street art is dynamic, and we want the app to reflect that dynamism in every corner.