Mimi Chan and Ustavi Jhaveri from Miami’s School of Pop Culture Engineering have gone on an epic quest to rid our Instagram feeds of poorly positioned snapshots. Noticing that tourists have a seemingly limitless ability to take terrible photographs in even the most beautiful of settings, they walked around New York and San Francisco in search of the most foolproof vistas and then marked them off to help budding photographers capture their subjects from the best angle. With a stencil on the pavement where they should stand, and the hashtag #noshittyphotos, their marks offer guidance to struggling photographers to ‘place feet, point and click.’

While we’ve seen plenty of apps that encourage engagement with the non-virtual world, physical hacks that encourage altered behaviour in the digital realm are quite a bit rarer. The tongue in cheek experiment is a sideways nod to visual pollution to which we all inevitably contribute – do we really want to see millions of the same, filter-choked photos of the Golden Gate Bridge? Will the tourists queue to stand on those privileged spots? Probably not, but in the spirit of beautification, wayward friends, let’s all pledge #noshittyphotos.