Travel Journal: Photo Diary

I cannot take this app seriously. I tried it out to see what features and templates were being offered for the travel book option. I have to laugh. To be fair, I usually create my own using photoshop, which allows for much more customization, like adding little visual details, screenshots of itinerary maps, PNGs, personalized fonts, drawings, overlays, scans of receipts, etc, things that make the reliving the experience more sentimental and immersive, like a legitimate scrapbook. To make them on photoshop isn’t difficult at all. I am honestly in utter shock that the devs are charging $59 YEARLY for this app on top of an ADDITIONAL $30-60 each book. Absolutely despicable. This app is quite literally scamming people for something can be done for free in the pages app or notes app within minutes for free. The templates and fonts are so juvenile and barren, lack customization, and are borderline tacky, I’m positive 5 year old could produce better. I cannot believe that this app has such great reviews. Even if you appreciate the simplicity or solely use the app as a travel journal $40-$60 a year for what it is a complete ripoff. Very brazen developers.

For the most part this is usable software, although using pictures is buggy. Sometimes I load up a bunch of pics for the day’s journal and one will disappear and I get a duplicate of another. The bottom section with arrows is a mystery. Sometimes it shows blank boxes with arrows, sometimes it shows duplicates of pictures I’ve already included elsewhere, and sometimes it’s nonexistent. My biggest complaint though is that in my opinion, if you pay for a subscription, all ads should be removed. I wrote to the company via their support page asking how to remove their ads and not surprisingly did not get an answer whatsoever. I’ve tried several journaling apps over the years when we travel - and so far have been underwhelmed by all. They either charge more as you add content or they have blatantly distracting ads or just don’t work. This is somewhere in between. I’ll use it for this trip and then cancel the subscription and look for something else. Or hey … I’m a retired developer- maybe I’ll write my own.

After doing some research on travel journaling apps, I chose this one to start the long overdue process of digitizing my handwritten travel journals from the past four decades. Entering text is very easy, and there are numerous page layouts to choose from. However, there are limitations with regard to where and how photos can be placed in the layouts and the sizing of them. Wish the app had more flexibility to edit size and place photos exactly where you want them. I ordered my first set of printed copies of a journal from one trip and was reasonably impressed at the quality of the printed book. I signed up for the annual subscription so I can enjoy other benefits as well. Other apps I’ve used are much better with handling large numbers of photos, but I like that this one handles a lot of text very well with just a few photos thrown in for visual appeal.