Some of you will remember the time before the Internet and smartphones. Back when there was no GPS, you had just a plain old map to coordinate your trip. You planned ahead, you marked your stations by drawing them with a pencil and you probably sat for hours afterwards to match photos to a certain stop.
Thanks to the wonders of GPS, the iPhone and some really ingenious programmers, you can now use one app to track your entire journey, complete with live positioning, photos and notes. Meet Trip Journal, a travel diary for the iPhone.
What it is and what it isn’t
It’s important to understand right away what Trip Journal is and what it isn’t so you wont be disappointed: Trip Journal is not made to plan ahead, it’s made to track your movement (either live or when you chose to mark yourself at a place). It allows you to take and store photos and notes together with check-ins and it allows you to export the entire trip to various other sites. Think of Trip Journal as a travel diary.
If you are looking for an app that allows you to plan your trip – selecting noteworthy places to visit, hotels to sleep in and bars to hang out with friends – you better take a look at the excellent Itinerary which we reviewed earlier.
How to record a trip
Trip Journal greets you with a wonderful old-style interface reminding you of an old and faded map which makes you feel a little like Indiana Jones. Assuming you are at the beginning of your journey, start a new trip and enter the necessary information.
Create a new trip
There are two options of how to track your trip: you can either check in via GPS at various locations, or you can have Trip Journal keep continuous track of your movements. The latter option is more battery consuming, since the app needs to fetch data all the time, but I wish I had discovered that option while being in Rome — due to all the excitement during a trip, its so easy to simply forget to check in. To enable continuous tracking, just tap the paw icon in the lower part of the screen.
Trip Journal can be used SAFELY outside of your own country. It only uses the GPS module, which does not require an active internet connection and thereby keeps your phone bill safe.
Activate continuous tracking
To single out certain points of interest, you should create a waypoint when you are there. To do that, simply tap the flag icon, wait until your position is calculated and then name the waypoint. You can create these at a later date as well if you forgot, but they won’t be in chronological order.
For every waypoint, you can add photos and notes, which will then be displayed when you select the detail view of a waypoint. It’s an amazingly easy way to track your experiences, especially since you can add photos and notes for as long as you’re on the trip. So if you only checked in at, say, the St. Peters Cathedral in Rome, you can add your photos and impressions at night when you’re back in your hotel room. You can take images from within the app itself, or, if you prefer another app for taking photos, you can import them from the camera roll.
Detailed view of waypoint information
At any given time during your trip, you can hit Trip View, the large map in the middle of your screen, to see literally everything: all your waypoints, media and the trip route on a map.
Detailed view of the entire trip with all separate waypoints
Detailed view of entire trip on map and statistics
Where to go from here?
So now that you have finished your trip, you need to end it, just make sure that you’ve added all your media by then. While you can add comments to photos later on as well, you can’t add photos without reopening your trip (which might mess up your statistics like when the trip ended and such).
Of course, Trip Journal is about being social and so you can export your entire trip to Facebook, for which there is a separate free app. It displays your trip data in a gorgeous interface, allowing you and your friends to browse your media and look at your waypoints and the associated information.
View of exported trip on Facebook
Once you’ve published your trip, you can also embed it on popular sites like WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, Squarespace, Tumblr and Posterous. The code necessary is generated by the Facebook app and only needs to be copied and pasted into your own blog.
Wait, there’s more! There are six more ways to share your trip, including Google Earth, GPX, Flickr and Picasa. Recently, Trip Journal for iPhone received the complimentary viewing app for iPad, called Trip Viewer. It allows you to view your entire trip on the bigger display. Just export your iPhone data via the iTunes button, save it from the “Apps” dialog in iTunes and then drag it into the Trip Viewer app when you connect your iPad to iTunes.
View trip in Trip Viewer for iPad
Play trip and enjoy the animated balloon 
Verdict
I’ve been a Trip Journal user for a long time and I’m still finding out new stuff about it (if you want to speed up the process, take a look at the great introductory presentation). The app makes tracking your trip extremely easy, even though there are aspects which need improvement, like being able to add waypoints at a later time, but change the date of the waypoint so it fits into the entire trip. Or changing the start waypoint (including it’s position and time) if you’ve forgotten to set it. Mostly, I wish I could add photos and videos to a trip even after I’ve ended it, without me having to reopen the trip.
But those are details and when looking at the big picture here, Trip Journal does an amazing job of keeping your memorable moments organized and offers an easy way to share those moments with family and friends. I hope that maybe one day it will be possible to export a trip in a printable format like PDF, but for now, the app is already pretty amazing.
How do you keep track of your trip and the memories that go with it? Let us know in the comments!
