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Photo Shift Builder

Cut a photo into sliding tiles that must be shuffled back together to unlock a geocache reveal.

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Free, just a username and passphrase, no email. Caches you build show up in My Caches so you can reopen and edit them without hunting for the edit link, and watch plays and wins. The same account syncs My Puzzle Texts across devices and manages your short links.

My Caches
Do not put sensitive, personal, or inappropriate content in a cache. Anything you create here is public to anyone with the link, and you are responsible for what you publish. Keep a copy of your edit key, it is the only way to change or delete your cache later.

Play your own cache before you publish it

Settings that look fair in this form can be brutal, or trivial, in the field. Finish the game yourself, start to end, on the kind of device your finders will use, and check that the difficulty, timers, hints, wording, and the final reveal all behave the way you intended. Every cache you create here comes with a play link and an edit link, so you can test it, tune it, and test it again before anyone else sees it.

Cut a photo into a full board of equal, wide strips for a geocache. Finders drag a tile anywhere on the board and whatever it lands on slides into the gap it left. When two tiles that really are neighbors in the picture come together, they stick and move as one slab from then on. The final coordinates or keyword stay on the server until the whole picture is one piece.

The finder receives shuffled tile art in a random order, never your original image URL and never an answer map. Every move is applied on the server. No browser game can stop a determined computer-vision program from imitating a person.
Anything you publish is public to anyone with the play link. Keep your edit link private. You can upload the picture straight from this device, or paste an HTTPS image URL instead.

Your cache

Puzzle picture

Upload a picture from this device, or paste a direct JPG, PNG, GIF or WebP URL. Big photos are shrunk before they are stored.

The board takes the shape of your picture, so nothing is cut off. Finders see it scaled to their screen.

On solve, reveal

Changing the picture or the number of tiles cuts a new set of tiles. While that cut is running, and if it fails, finders cannot play this cache, so save those changes when nobody is out looking.