The Travel Book: a photo book that starts with your trip

Your photos already know a lot about your trip. We built a photo book that starts from that, instead of from a blank page.

4 min read We make the Travel Book at KR Maps. This is why we built it the way we did.

A hardcover Travel Book lying open on a wooden table: a photograph of a covered market on the left page, and on the right a map page headed Sengkang and around
A chapter opening in a real Travel Book. Nobody typed the place name or the dates. They came with the photos.

Most photo books start with a blank page

You come home with a few hundred photos. You open a photo book tool to do something with them, and it hands you an empty page.

Then the work starts. Which photos go together? What day was that? Where were we when I took this one? You drag pictures into boxes, type in the places, and try to remember the order it all happened in. It is a lot of remembering.

We thought there was a better way.

Your photos already know the trip

Every photo you take has the time it was taken written inside it. If location was on, it has the place too. That is true of the photo of the cathedral, and it is just as true of the photo of your coffee.

So we started there. Instead of asking you to rebuild the trip from memory, the Travel Book reads what the photos already know and builds the book around the trip you actually took.

What that looks like. Made from real book pages, not a screen recording.

A few things fall out of that on their own.

  • The photos sort themselves into days, in the order you took them.
  • The places you stayed become chapters, with their names on the page.
  • Your route shows up on real maps. The whole trip on the opening pages, and the drive, the ferry or the night train between places drawn as a line.
  • The date, where you were and even the weather come along with each day. Nobody types them.
  • Photos from the last morning stay on the last morning. Nothing floats loose.
A hardcover Travel Book open to its opening spread on a wooden table: on the left the title Indonesia, Teluknaga to Tuban, a row of figures reading 14 days, 2,310 miles, 6 journeys, 313 photos and 20 places, and the six journeys listed; on the right a map of Java, Borneo and Sulawesi with the whole route drawn as one looping line
The opening spread of a real book. The route, the days, the miles and the places, all read from the photos.
A hardcover Travel Book open to a getting-there page: a teal and cream map spanning both sheets with the route drawn across it and a small card reading for Béziers
The stretch between two places gets a page of its own.
Close-up of the top of a printed day page: the heading ends in at Mertoyudan, beneath it the times 08:52 to 11:33, a duration of 2h 41m and the weather, Overcast 84 degrees, with a small street map to the right
The top of a day. The times, the weather, and a small map of where you were.

The little photos help tell the story too

A travel book does not have to be your thirty best photographs.

The blurry shot of the departures board says what time you left. The picture out of the car window says what the road looked like. The hotel room, the ferry ticket, the road sign at the turn-off. None of them would make it into a frame on the wall. All of them tell you what actually happened that day.

Because the book is built around the trip and not around a shortlist, those photos have somewhere to go. They sit in their day, next to the ones you are proud of, and the day reads like the day.

A Travel Book open to a spread of street photographs from Narbonne: a cafe terrace under plane trees, shuttered stone facades and a narrow lane
A day in Narbonne. The good photos and the ordinary ones, in the order they happened.

You still make the book

The trip gives the book its shape. What it becomes is up to you.

Flip through the draft. Give the best photo of a day the whole page. Swap one out. Move one. Cut a spread you do not love. Write a line under a photo, or nothing at all. Rename a day. Pick a different look for the maps, or a different cover. It prints exactly as you leave it.

The builder on one spread: the list of chapters down the left, the spread in the middle, and a panel on the right offering other layouts for that page
The builder. Chapters down the left, the page in the middle, other layouts on the right.
Four maps of the same route along the Amalfi Coast, Naples to Salerno, in four map styles: warm parchment, sand and slate blue, pale green chalk and deep teal
The same route, in four of the map styles.
Eight Travel Book covers rendered as closed books in three sizes, two to a row: Athens, Bedugul, Coron, Dhaka, India, Kyoto with the name set enormous and the photograph inside the letters, Zanzibar and Castelluccio, each with a photograph and the trip title on the front
Eight of the cover designs, on the different sizes. The photo and the title on each one are yours.
Six Travel Book back covers, two to a row, each a map in one colour with the whole route drawn across it as a single line: the Great Lakes in dark blue, Italy at Easter on cream, Jordan in orange, the Mekong in teal, the Inca Trail in orange and Sri Lanka by rail on cream
The back of every book is a map with your whole route drawn across it. A few of the colours.
Two finished hardcover Travel Books, one resting across the other on a white table: Indonesia, with a market photograph on its cover, and From Nîmes to Céret, with a harbour town at dusk on its cover
Two trips, two covers. The photo on the front is one of yours.

Something you can hold

You already took the trip. You already took the photos. Everything needed to tell the story is sitting in them right now, on your phone, in the order it happened.

We built the Travel Book to turn that into something you can put on a shelf and pick up in ten years. Not a collection of your favourite pictures. A record of where you went.

If you want to try it, the builder is free and there is no account to make. You can see how it works page by page, or look at some finished books first. Sizes and prices are on the pricing page. Books start at $26.95, with free US shipping.

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