A new crop of savvy, travel-friendly apps is helping vacationers turn their most exciting memories into something tangible with just a few taps on their smartphones. Whether you’re hoping to create a detailed, multimedia journal or just want to record your experiences beyond Facebook status updates and Instagram posts, here are the best apps for recording your memories digitally with ease.
1. Trip Journal
With Google Earth integration, Trip Journal allows family and friends to see the routes you’ve traveled and waypoints for visited locations, as well as full-screen photos, videos, comments and blog entries. Trip stats such as distance traveled, time spent, and geography traversed also are documented in real time, and everything is integrated with your favorite social networks and content-sharing platforms.
2. TravelPod
Billed as “the web’s original travel blog,” TravelPod’s free platform works seamlessly online and off. The app is a great way to capture and share your travel adventures on the go, and each post you create can include your own intriguing content, photos and a map. Visitors to your blog can see the course of your trip, read entries in chronological order, or pinpoint a certain location to read stories about a specific part of your journey. They also can leave comments, interact with your posts, and share them on social media.
3. Everplaces
In addition to serving as an easy way to chronicle your trip with photos and notes of the things you see and experience, Everplaces also lets you create and share customized maps and guides based on your personal travel diary. This app is ideal for saving your trip details and comparing stories with a large online community of travelers.
4. Quik
Quik is the fastest, simplest way to create amazing travel videos—automatically. In just seconds, the app analyzes your photos and video clips to find your best moments, adds beautiful transitions and effects, and syncs everything to a soundtrack. Customize your story with selected music, filters and graphics, then share with friends and family over text, email or your social networks.
5. Heyday
Heyday is an “automatic photo journal” that notes the geographic locations you visit and pairs them with the photos taken each day, in order to reproduce an editable and shareable album. It helps make remembering effortless, so you don’t forget a single day.
6. Evernote by Moleskine
If you relish putting pen to paper, you can nurse your travel journal nostalgia with Evernote by Moleskine, the first paper notebooks specifically designed to create digitized versions of handwritten notes. Evernote not only captures your physical notes and drawings with a special camera but it also optimizes and seamlessly integrates them with your Evernote account, where you can easily store, manage, search and share them. It’s where old school meets new.
Recording and preserving travel stories with these apps—or in the pages of a traditional travel log—gives you a way to turn vacation experiences into lifelong memories you can access, share, and relive whenever you want. So when you head out on your adventure, make sure to include these apps on your packing list and start capturing your memories.
