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What TravelJotter is

TravelJotter is a personal travel journal. You log your trips — where you went, when, and how — and the app gives you a browsable history, a map of everywhere you've been, and statistics about your time at home and away.

Your data is yours to control. There's no TravelJotter account or developer-operated server. When iCloud is available to TravelJotter, your data syncs through your private iCloud account. Location search uses Apple Maps, which processes your search text and requests for selected places (see Choosing locations below). See the Privacy Policy for more about the Apple services the app uses.

Trips and Travel Legs

A trip is made up of one or more Travel Legs. A travel leg is a single movement between two places — a flight, a train ride, a drive. A weekend away might be two travel legs (there and back); a longer journey might have many.

This matters because TravelJotter works out where you were between travel legs. If one leg ends in Lisbon and the next leg leaves from Lisbon, the app knows you stayed in Lisbon in between. Logging both directions of a journey is what lets the app count your days at a destination.

Trips can take whatever shape your travel does:

• A simple round trip: Home → Destination → Home
• A multi-stop journey: Home → Destination 1 → Destination 2 → Destination 3 → Home
• A single one-way leg: Origin → Destination
• Disconnected legs within one trip: Origin → Destination 1 → Destination 2, and separately Destination 3 → Destination 4

A few rules keep trips consistent:

• Every leg needs a starting place, an ending place, and a departure date. The arrival date is optional.
• A travel leg's start and end must be different places, and it can't arrive before it departs.
• Travel legs within one trip can't overlap in time.
• You can enter just a date without a time — that simply means "that calendar day."
• Future trips are welcome. Log a planned trip and it appears as upcoming; a trip you're on right now shows as ongoing.

Overlapping travel between different trips is allowed if you really need it, but we strongly recommend against it: it makes the data summary unreliable, and much of the information for that time period becomes unavailable.

Recommendations

• Organise trips sensibly. In theory you can lump several journeys (a work conference in June, a family holiday in August) into one trip, but separate trips keep your history tidy and much easier to browse.
• Ideally, start and end each trip at your home location. We understand sometimes there may be reasons for entering an open-ended trip — just remember to add the trip that eventually closes them off, so your days can be counted.
• Add times, not just dates. Give each leg a departure and arrival time — particularly when a journey takes longer than a day, or when several legs happen on the same day. This makes the generated data more accurate.
• Don't overlap travel between different trips (see above).

Choosing locations

When choosing a travel leg's starting or ending place, or a home location, you can reuse a suggested location, choose an Apple Maps search result, or enter the details manually.

• Search and select. Type a city, town or village, or use Search place or address to look for an airport, landmark or address. Adding a state or country helps narrow the suggestions. Tap an Apple Maps result to use its location details, coordinates and time zone. Search needs an internet connection. Occasionally a result lacks the city or locality details TravelJotter needs; if it can't be loaded, try another result or enter the location manually.
• Enter manually. Fill in City (a city, town or village), select Country and Time Zone, and tap Done. State is optional, but helps distinguish places with the same name. Choose the location's time zone, which may differ from your device's. Manual entry does not look up coordinates; locations without coordinates still work in your trips and statistics but do not appear as pins or route endpoints on the map.
• Reuse a location. Locations already used in your trips or home-location history, and locations in the trip you're editing, appear as suggestions. Selecting one reuses its saved details.

TravelJotter records places at city, town or village level. Searching for an airport or landmark helps find the locality; its specific place name or street address isn't saved. Coordinates from a selected search result provide a representative map position.

As you type in the location fields, the app requests suggestions from Apple Maps — even if you ultimately choose manual entry. Selecting a search result also requests its details from Apple. These requests are handled under Apple's Maps privacy terms.

Why a location shows "days unavailable"

The Data section tries to calculate as accurate a number of days as possible. If the information is incomplete or ambiguous — for example, if several journeys happen on one day without departure or arrival times — it will try its best to construct the timeline. Sometimes that simply isn't possible, especially when the records can't prove when a stay started or ended. In that case, the app shows days unavailable instead of inventing a number.

The most common cause is a one-way trip: if you logged a flight to Oslo but no leg leaving Oslo, the app can't know how long you stayed — so Oslo's day count is unavailable rather than wrong. Adding the return leg (or the next onward leg) resolves it.

A few related things you may notice:

• Future trips count for nothing. A planned trip adds no days anywhere, and a trip you're currently on is counted only up to today.
• Gaps aren't attributed. If one leg ends in Paris and the next departs from Rome with nothing in between, the time in between isn't credited to any place — the app doesn't know where you were, so it doesn't pretend to.
• Overlapping trips trigger a warning. If two trips overlap in time, the statistics can't be reliable, and the app says so.

Your home location

Statistics need to know where home is — it's how the app tells time away from time at home.

Home is a timeline, not a single place. If you've moved, add a home period for each place you've lived, with its start and end dates (Settings → Home Location). This keeps statistics correct for older trips. The day you move can belong to both homes — that's intentional.

Photos and videos

Photos and videos you attach to a trip stay in your photo library — TravelJotter stores only a link to them, never a copy. That means:

• Attaching a photo doesn't create another copy of it.
• If you delete a photo from your library, it disappears from the trip too.
• On another device using the same iCloud Photos library, your trip photos normally reconnect once syncing is complete and TravelJotter has access to them. Photos copied through AirDrop, Messages or downloads may also reconnect. If their links don't work, TravelJotter looks for a unique match by date, image dimensions and filename; otherwise it shows them as unavailable.
• If you export and import to a new device that doesn't have the photos, they won't be available on the new device.
• A photo that's still downloading from iCloud shows a loading indicator — that's different from unavailable, and it will appear once downloaded.

Auto Search Photos finds library items taken during the trip's dates. You can remove photos from the trip or add others manually afterwards.

If you've allowed TravelJotter access to only some of your photos, Auto Search finds only those. Choosing a photo outside that set asks you to allow access to it first.

iCloud sync and Apple Accounts

TravelJotter automatically syncs your travel data through your private iCloud database when iCloud is available to the app. You control access in iOS Settings under your Apple Account.

A few things to know:

• Sync can take a little while. The status in Settings shows the latest activity this device has observed; it cannot guarantee that every change has reached every device.
• If you turn off iCloud access for TravelJotter or sign out of your Apple Account, trips that came from iCloud disappear from this device. They may return after the original account and iCloud access are restored, provided they still exist in that account's iCloud data.
• Records created while iCloud is unavailable may remain on the device after you sign in to an Apple Account, and may then upload to that account.
• Switching Apple Accounts changes which account's trips are shown. TravelJotter does not automatically delete or move trips between accounts.
• Recovery snapshots (see details below under Keeping your data safe) are stored locally and remain available after an account change. Restoring a snapshot adds its trips to the account currently enabled on this device.

If changes have not appeared on another device, make sure both devices use the same Apple Account, TravelJotter is enabled under iCloud settings, and both devices have an internet connection. Then allow a little time for syncing.

Keeping your data safe

• Recovery snapshots. TravelJotter creates automatic local backups as you make changes. You can check their status, view available snapshots and restore from them in Settings → Recovery Snapshots. A snapshot may not include your most recent changes. If you need to free space on your device, the same screen lets you delete all snapshots; this does not turn off automatic snapshots. Don't rely on snapshots alone — we recommend also exporting your data from time to time and keeping the file somewhere safe.
• Export. You can export everything as a file at any time (Settings → Export). The .atlog format is a complete backup that can be imported back into the app. CSV is handy for spreadsheets, but it's export-only — a CSV file cannot be imported back.
• Import. Importing an .atlog file or restoring a snapshot adds missing trips and home locations while keeping your existing data. To remove existing travel data first, use Settings → Delete All. This keeps your home-location history, saved locations and recovery snapshots. A safety snapshot is created before deletion. Deletion is permanent and syncs through iCloud; importing afterwards is a separate action. Imports save progressively. Cancelling removes the trips and home locations the import had added. Settings → Undo Last Import removes what the most recent import or restore added and you have not edited since; trips and home locations you edited afterwards, on any device, are kept, as is anything that already existed. The removals sync through iCloud. Undo is available only on the device that imported, is cleared whenever the iCloud account changes, signs in or signs out, and ends with Delete All.

Note that snapshots and exports contain your trip data, but not your photos and videos — those live only in your photo library (see above). After a restore or import, the app reconnects to them there automatically where it can.

What TravelJotter is not for

TravelJotter is a personal record-keeper. Its statistics are estimates based on what you've logged, and they must not be used for visa applications, tax residency, immigration, or any other legal or official purpose. For anything of that kind, please rely on official records and professional advice.

Questions/problems/suggestions?

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