I went a considerable distance to a beach I had seen photographs of for years. It was exactly as beautiful as the pictures. It was also about forty metres wide, backed by a car park, and shared that morning with perhaps two hundred people.
None of that was hidden. It simply was not in any of the images, and I had drawn conclusions the images did not support.
What a photograph cannot tell you
Four things, all of which determine whether you will enjoy being somewhere.
Scale. A wide lens and a low angle make a small cove look like a bay. There is no reference in most landscape photographs that would let you judge size.
What is behind the camera. This is the big one. A photograph is a selection, and the most common selection is the one that excludes the road, the development, the crowd and the car park.
How many people are there. Almost every published image of a beautiful place was taken at a moment with nobody in it, which for popular places means very early, out of season, or with patience and cropping.
And the conditions. Photographs are taken on the good days. The place you go to may have a completely different character in the wind, the haze, or the flat light of the middle of the day.
How to find out anyway
All of it is checkable and it takes about ten minutes.
Satellite view tells you the actual size, what is immediately behind, whether there is a road, a car park, a resort, and how far it is from anything.
Street level imagery, where it exists, shows the approach and what the surroundings look like at ground level rather than from a drone.
Visitor photographs rather than professional ones. These are taken on ordinary days with ordinary crowds and ordinary weather, and they are far more representative.
And video rather than stills, which is harder to curate and which shows the movement, the crowd and frequently the sound.
The crowd question specifically
The variable that most affects experience and the one hardest to research.
What helps: looking at reviews for mentions of parking, queues or arriving early, all of which indicate a place that gets busy. Checking whether tour buses go there, which is the single largest factor. And looking at photographs with timestamps, if available, to see what different times of day look like.
For nearly every famous coastal spot, the answer is that it is quiet at dawn and busy from mid-morning until late afternoon.
Which means the place in the photograph does exist. It exists for about ninety minutes after sunrise and it requires getting up.
The alternative approach
The thing that has improved my trips most is deliberately not going to the photographed place.
Any coastline with one famous cove has a dozen others within a short distance that are structurally similar and photographically unknown, usually because they are slightly harder to reach or have no parking.
Satellite view finds these in minutes. Walking twenty minutes from a car park empties almost any coastal location.
The experience is frequently better, because the thing that made the photographed place special was the landscape, and the landscape continues around the corner.
The honest counterargument
Some places are famous because they are genuinely exceptional, and the alternative nearby is not as good.
Dismissing everywhere popular is its own kind of error, and I have talked myself out of things that would have been worth the crowd.
The reasonable position is to go, and to go at a time when the place resembles what drew you there — early, off season, midweek — rather than to avoid it or to arrive at eleven on a Saturday in August and be disappointed.
What I actually do now
Satellite view before booking anything, always. It takes two minutes and has changed several plans.
Visitor photographs rather than official ones, sorted by recent.
An assumption that anything famous will be busy from mid-morning, and a plan that accounts for it.
And a habit of finding one unphotographed alternative for every photographed destination, which has produced most of the coastal days I actually remember.
Photographing it yourself
A related point about the pictures you will take.
The images that made you want to go were taken in particular light — usually the hour after sunrise or before sunset — and at midday the same place photographs flatly no matter what you do.
Which is another argument for being there early, since the two goals of avoiding crowds and getting decent light happen to coincide exactly.
It also lowers the disappointment of a place looking ordinary in the middle of the day, because you know why.
The place that photographs badly
The inverse is worth mentioning. Some coastlines are genuinely wonderful to be on and photograph poorly, usually because what makes them good is scale, sound and weather rather than a single composition.
Long flat shores, big estuaries, wide skies. None of these produce an image that makes anybody want to go, and several of them are the best days I have had.
Which means selecting destinations from photographs systematically biases you toward a narrow category of dramatic, compact, easily framed places, and away from everything that has to be experienced rather than seen.