Credits and data sources

GeoNames

Every town, city, region and country you can search on this site — and the coordinates behind them — comes from the GeoNames geographical database, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).

What we changed

We use the cities5000 export, which covers settlements above five thousand people, and we have modified it:

• We keep only the fields this site needs — the GeoNames identifier, name, ASCII name, region, country, coordinates and population — and discard the rest.
• We add one field of our own: a search key built from each place’s name, its alternate spellings, its region and its country, with accents stripped and case removed. It is why searching “Lisboa” finds a home listed under “Lisbon”.
• We store a trimmed copy of the dataset alongside this site’s own code, so that setting the site up does not depend on GeoNames being reachable at the time.

Place names, coordinates and population figures are otherwise unaltered. Any error in them is more likely ours than theirs.

GeoNames is not affiliated with Home Swap Club, and nothing here should be read as GeoNames endorsing this site.

Photography

Photography by Antoine Mutin: the travel and street photography on the homepage, how it works and about pages, and in link previews.

The rotating photographs on the homepage banner, and one interior photograph, come from Unsplash and is used under the Unsplash License. It will be replaced with a picture of a member’s home as those arrive.