Organizing 100+ Locations in Notion Without Going Crazy
Organize locations in Notion with tagging systems, relations, and smart views. Manage hundreds of places efficiently. Get started now.
To organize locations in Notion effectively at scale, you need a tagging system, smart views, and a maintenance mindset. Without these, your database becomes a digital junk drawer where useful information gets buried under sheer volume. Here's how to manage hundreds or even thousands of places while still finding exactly what you need in seconds.
Your location database started innocently enough. A few restaurants you wanted to remember, some travel destinations, maybe a handful of client offices. Now you're staring at 150 entries and scrolling has become an archaeological expedition. Finding that one café in Lisbon feels like searching for a specific grain of sand on a beach.
The Core Problem with Growing Databases
Location databases grow differently than other Notion databases. A task database naturally archives completed items. A reading list moves books to "finished." But locations persist. That restaurant you visited three years ago might still be relevant for your next trip to that city. The hiking trail you discovered last summer is just as valid today.
This permanence means location databases only grow. Without intentional organization, they become overwhelming. If you're just getting started, check out our complete guide to Notion's Place property to build on a solid foundation.
Building a Tagging System That Scales
The foundation of any manageable location database is a thoughtful tagging system, but the key word is thoughtful. Too few tags and everything blurs together. Too many and you'll never remember which ones to apply.
Start with geography. A multi-select property for country works well for international collections, while a separate property for city or region handles local organization. This two-tier approach lets you filter broadly by country, then narrow down to specific areas without creating an unwieldy list of combined tags like "France-Paris" and "France-Lyon."
Category tags should reflect how you actually think about places. If you're building a travel database, categories like "food," "culture," "nature," and "nightlife" probably match your mental model. For a real estate database, "residential," "commercial," and "industrial" make more sense. Resist the urge to create hyper-specific categories; "Italian restaurant" and "French restaurant" can both live under "restaurant" with cuisine as a separate property if you really need that distinction.
Status properties help separate aspirational from actual. A simple "visited" checkbox or a select with "want to go," "been there," and "favorite" options lets you filter your database by experience level. This becomes invaluable when you're planning a trip and want to see only unvisited places in a particular city.
Using Relations for Hierarchy
When your location database serves multiple purposes, relations create powerful organizational layers without cluttering your main database with dozens of properties.
Consider a travel planning setup where you have a trips database and a locations database. Each location can relate to multiple trips, and each trip shows all its associated locations. Planning a new trip to Japan? Create the trip entry, then filter your locations by country and link the ones you want to visit. The trip page becomes a curated subset of your larger collection. For more on this workflow, see our guide on team travel planning in Notion.
This pattern works equally well for client management, where locations relate to client records, or for content creation, where places link to blog posts or videos featuring them. The location database stays clean while relations provide context-specific views.
Smart Filters and Views for Large Location Databases
Views are where large databases become manageable. A single database can power dozens of different perspectives, each showing exactly what you need for a specific purpose.
Create a "Planning" view filtered to unvisited places, sorted by country or region. Build a "Favorites" view showing only your highest-rated locations. Set up city-specific views for places you visit frequently. Each view is just a lens on the same underlying data, so adding a new location automatically appears in every relevant view.
Linked databases extend this further. Embed a filtered view of your locations database on a trip planning page, a city guide page, or a project dashboard. The locations live in one place but appear wherever they're useful.
For very large databases, consider using the "Load more" pagination setting rather than showing all entries at once. This improves performance and makes the interface less overwhelming, even if it means an extra click to see everything.
Performance Considerations
Notion handles large databases reasonably well, but many users notice that performance can degrade as database complexity increases. Generally, databases with fewer properties and simpler configurations tend to load faster than those with many properties, especially when those properties include relations and rollups.
Keep your location database focused on location-specific information. If you're tracking detailed notes, reviews, or extensive metadata, consider whether that information belongs in the location entry itself or in a related database. A "visits" database that relates to locations can store date-specific information like what you ordered, who you were with, and your detailed impressions, keeping the main location database lean.
Complex formulas that reference multiple properties may impact database loading times. If you're using formulas for display purposes, consider whether the same result could be achieved with a simpler approach.
When to Split Into Multiple Databases
Sometimes the answer isn't better organization within one database but recognizing that you're actually tracking different things. A database containing restaurants, hiking trails, client offices, and vacation rentals might be trying to do too much.
A signal that splitting might make sense is when your properties don't apply universally. If half your entries have "cuisine type" filled in and the other half have "trail difficulty," you may be looking at two databases that would work better separately.
Split by purpose rather than by geography. A "restaurants" database and an "outdoor activities" database, each with location-appropriate properties, will serve you better than a "Europe places" database and an "Asia places" database that each contain mixed content.
After splitting, you can still create unified views using linked databases on a master page, giving you the best of both worlds: focused databases with relevant properties and a combined view when you need the big picture.
The Maintenance Mindset
Large databases require occasional maintenance. Set a recurring reminder to review your locations quarterly. Archive places that have closed, update information that's changed, and evaluate whether your tagging system still serves your needs.
This maintenance becomes much easier when you export your data periodically. Notion to Maps can generate a complete export of your locations in KML, GPX, GeoJSON, or CSV format, giving you both a backup and a different perspective on your data. Seeing your places on a map often reveals organizational opportunities that aren't obvious in table view.
A well-organized location database is a genuine asset, a personal geographic knowledge base that grows more valuable over time. The investment in structure pays dividends every time you need to find that perfect spot you discovered years ago.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many locations can I store in a Notion database?
Notion doesn't impose a strict limit on database rows, so you can store thousands of locations. However, databases with more than a few hundred entries may load more slowly, especially with complex properties like relations and rollups. Use filtered views, pagination settings, and lean property structures to maintain performance as your database grows.
Can multiple team members edit the same Notion database?
Yes, Notion supports real-time collaboration. Multiple team members can add, edit, and organize locations simultaneously in a shared workspace. Use page-level permissions to control who can edit versus view, and consider using comments for discussion without cluttering the database itself.
What's the best way to organize locations by category and region?
Use separate properties for each dimension. Create a multi-select for "Category" (restaurants, hiking, hotels) and another for "Region" or "Country." This lets you filter by either dimension independently or combine them. Avoid creating combined tags like "France-Restaurants" which become unwieldy as your database grows.
Should I use one database or multiple databases for different location types?
If your location types share most properties (name, address, rating, notes), keep them in one database with a "Type" property for filtering. If they need very different properties (restaurants need "cuisine" while trails need "difficulty"), split into separate databases. You can always create a master page with linked views of multiple databases for a unified view.
How do I back up my Notion location database?
Export regularly using Notion to Maps to get your locations in portable formats like CSV or GeoJSON. These exports include all your properties and coordinates, serving as both backups and data you can use in other applications. Notion's native export works too, but doesn't separate coordinates into usable columns.