Thanks to photos, videos, notes and geodata about places, smartphones are great travel companions. The best way to bring all these holiday memories together is to use a travel diary app.

These apps bundle together the most important places and their descriptions, as well as photos, video material and audio recordings. Once the apps are connected to the internet you can customize the snippets into a complete trip report with interactive maps and save it as a blog entry in your user account. The reports can be fully or partially published, shared only with friends or kept private.

To save the smartphone’s battery and ensure the travel report is not overflowing with details, it’s advisable to only open the app at places where there is definitely something to see and talk about.

The fear that the apps send all impressions straight to the server and thereby incur high mobile phone charges is unfounded. Instead the bulk of data is only transmitted when the smartphone is in a wi-fi network. While underway the apps uses GPS to set waypoints.

German computer magazine c’t tested a number of the apps and decided that the free app MobilityTrip 2.3 (Android and iOS) was the best.

Also recommended were the paid iOS apps TrackMyTour 4.1.2 and TripColor 1.0.16. The testers found the three apps easy to use while travelling and their automatically generated blogs were well designed.

For those who prefer to collect their experiences centrally in one place or make their own travel blog the experts advise using the WordPress app or diary apps such as Evernote, Day One or Memoires.

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