Guide
Finding a restaurant from a story.
A story lasts 24 hours. The craving comes back three weeks later, on a Tuesday night, at the exact moment the name of the place escapes you. Here are the methods that work, in the order you should try them.
1. Just ask
It's the fastest method and the one everyone forgets. Whoever posted knows the name, and usually remembers the dish. A direct message costs ten seconds and saves twenty minutes of digging. The only case where it fails is a story from an account you don't know well enough to write to.
2. The location tag, if there is one
On Instagram and TikTok alike, a place tagged at the top of a story is clickable and leads to the place page. The catch: plenty of people tag a neighbourhood, a city, or nothing at all. And the tag disappears with the story. If you see a place go by and it interests you, click right then: it's the only window where the information still exists.
3. Saved posts, if you had the reflex
A saved post stays accessible, unlike a story. Better than nothing, but it isn't an address book: saved items mix recipes, clothes, memes and restaurants, with no sorting by city or occasion. Three months in, finding one specific place in there means scrolling a gallery.
4. Searching by neighbourhood
If you remember the neighbourhood and the kind of place, Instagram's place search or a plain map search usually gets there in a few tries. Pick a visual detail from the story, a storefront, a tiled floor, a sign, and compare. It's tedious but it works, especially in an area you know.
5. Your screenshots, and why they fail
The screenshot is the most common reflex and the least effective. It lands in a gallery of several thousand images, with no name, no address, no label. You only find it by looking for it by eye, and you only look for it if you remember it exists. Most are never reopened.
How Proof helps
Proof is built for exactly this moment: the place you spot goes into a list instead of ending up as a screenshot. It keeps its name, its address and its spot on the map, and it comes back when you look for a place in that neighbourhood. When a friend has been, you see their shot, a photo taken on site, and you know the place really exists.
What Proof doesn't do: find a story that has already vanished. No app can. The notebook solves the problem for next time, not for the one you already missed.