Journi Blog - Travel tracker

I found Journi online after moving to Spain about 18 months ago. I knew I would be siteseeing in Europe quite often and wanted to keep a diary of my travels. I find the app excellent for setting up individual trips and it automatically dates and maps the photos. At the end of 2019 I decided I wanted to create a book of my adventures. The app was easy to use and quite efficient. While there are a few things regarding editing I would love to see but really that would possibly take away from the simplicity of the app. Once I set up the book, I was concerned about price and quality. My book was 180€ but when I checked other apps and resources, that was a fair price for 190 page hardcover book. I have a friend I referred the app and he is now sharing his trips with friends. He just ordered a book as well. The quality of the book is great. You can’t beat Journi.

First, there is virtually nothing to get you started. Many apps when you run the first time will give you a quick overview. Not Journi. You are left to poke around and hope you figure it out. There is NO IN-APP HELP. The you tube channel has videos, however there is no sound and they chose to record them at a pace that is only helpful if you already know how to use the app. The app would greatly benefit from a brief introduction. For example, when you creat a new Journi it starts you off with a map. I spent 5 minutes trying to get the map to show the correct location. It turns out the app will do this automatically which is nice, but there is no way to know that in advance. Second, and this is the most limiting in my opinion. There are no photo captions. So, if you add a stop in France and add what Journi calls a “moment”, you can give the moment a title and description, but if you upload 10 pics, it will just show the grouping of pics with no way to indicate what each pic is. Since the main reason to do a trip journal is to preserve the memories of the trip, I don’t know why there isn’t a way to note what the pics are of. Some pics are obvious. But others are not. For example I added pics of specific things during a visit to the Louvre. I have no way to add a description of what the pics are and why I chose those pics out of the hundreds I could have chosen. This one thing will likely lead me to choose another app. FYI I opted for the premium service and it also does not allow for photo captions.

We took a 3 week trip to Europe and I purchased the premium package so that I could work offline when needed. I made a point each day to keep up with what that day brought and journi made it very easy to do this. My friends and family were able to follow what we were doing and my friends that we travelled with were also able to collaborate and add their photos. I have made other photo books that took me hours to put together as well as trying to remember the fun facts as well as memories could be a lot of work. Writing as we went along kept things fresh. Was able to send off for my book immediately and could not be more thrilled with the quality of it. If there is any improvement that I could list, it would be to be able to manipulate the pictures myself and put them where I want them in a page and also a note section where I could put gems down that I couldn’t finish with until the end of the day just to help me remember but these are minor compared to what I got.