traveldays started with an inspiration from a friend: We were traveling with a group of five,
and there was this one friend who always had this tiny, credit card-size notebook with him, where he would
occasionally scribble down some things. The rest of us didn't really get it, but he was adamant in
doing it.
It wasn't until two weeks into the trip that he finally let us have a peek at what he had written.
Amazingly, the few words that he noted down for each day let us remember exactly what
happened on that day, where we went and what we did. Even though it was literally just a couple
of words for each day. Notes that would appear meaningless to an outsider ("birdfeed scam",
"golden temple") would let us piece together the events of the day, helping us reminisce and
relive that particular day. (Much later I heard this technique referred to as
'micro-journaling')
That made me think of the hundreds of photos that I'd taken during the trip. I love taking photos
while traveling, because the process of taking pictures makes me much more aware of my surroundings.
It allows me to see at the world through different eyes, quite literally.
But afterwards, I wouldn't do much with these pictures, apart from storing them away on some hard
drive or somewhere in the cloud, stumbling accross them periodically when running out of space or
changing computers.
It became clear that there was a better way of documenting my travels and keeping the memories alive.
So the idea of traveldays was born: A beautiful, minimal
travel diary, for sharing and reminiscing. Just enough to remember my trip, just enough to give an
impression of my trip to friends and family, and also just enough to not be a hassle.
I first started developing traveldays as a side project in 2016. Besides my personal use, I
ran it for a travel company here in Germany, for their tour guides to upload travel albums
of their group tours.
They used it for a couple of years, and the tour participants loved having traveldays as a souvenir
of their trip.
Come the Corona crisis of 2020. Needless to say, touristic activity came to a complete
standstill. The company had to cancel all their trips for the year. I found traveldays out
of use and myself with a lot of free time on my hands.
The bad news aside, the lockdown gave me the chance to work on something that I had been planning
for a while, just never got around doing: Giving traveldays a complete overhaul and opening it up to use
for everybody.
So after a lot of work and a complete change of the underlying infrastructure, here we are.
You can register and start creating your own album as of now!
I'm also trying to make the
creation of albums as easy as possible. Especially while you're traveling, you don't want to
spend your time documenting, when the focus should be enjoying the moment and making the
most of it. And while traveldays has been optimized over the years, this new version does
many things differently. So if you experience a problem, or have an idea to improve
traveldays, please let me know at .
— Yunus