How to print a travel journal: PDF, photo book, export

Written by the people who make VoyageLogUpdated October 22, 20268 min read

The way to print a travel journal is to pick one of three routes: let an app build and ship a photo book, export a PDF and print it yourself or at a print shop, or export your raw data and lay it out in a template you control. The first is fastest, the second is cheapest and most flexible, the third is for people who want every page to look exactly right. This guide covers all three, what actually survives the move from screen to paper, and the small decisions (paper size, photo resolution, page order) that make the printed result worth keeping.

Why print a travel journal at all

A phone journal is easy to search and impossible to lose track of while you travel. It is a poor object to hand to someone. Your parents will not scroll through 240 entries from Lisbon. A printed booklet sits on a shelf, gets picked up at a dinner party and gets read start to finish.

There is also a plain safety reason. A printout is a backup that does not depend on a phone, an account or a cloud service surviving for ten more years. Anyone who has lost a phone mid-trip knows the feeling.

Printing is something you do once, after the trip, not during it. During the trip, keep the entries short (our guide on how to keep a travel journal covers the one-minute system). Printing is just the last step.

Three routes from phone to paper

Pick based on how much you care about layout and how much time you have after getting home.

Route 1: app-native printed books (Polarsteps, Journi Print, FindPenguins)

Some travel apps are built around this. You keep your trip in the app, press a button, and a printed book arrives. We checked each one today.

Polarsteps. Polarsteps generates a Travel Book from a trip you have logged. According to its help center, the trip needs at least five photos and its steps must be published. You preview the book in the app under "My Travel Books" or on the website, and the layout is assembled for you from your photos, stories, route and statistics. Printing and shipping are handled by an outside print partner. Prices differ between sources and may have changed, so check the current figure in the app before ordering.

Journi Print. Journi Print is a free app for making photo books on your phone. You tap "New Photo Book", choose photos, and it suggests designs. Its App Store listing describes digital print on 170 g/m2 paper. Journi also advertises FSC-certified paper and designer travel covers. We could not verify current prices, so we are not quoting any.

FindPenguins. FindPenguins offers a travel book too. Its travel book page says the book is generated from your FindPenguins travel profile, with texts, dates, maps, photos and stats, and that nothing needs dragging or formatting. Formats listed there are a hardcover and a lay-flat edition, each in two square sizes, 21 x 21 cm and 30 x 30 cm. Prices are on the site and change, so we leave them out.

The honest comparison

If you want a glossy book generated with almost no effort, these three are built for it, and VoyageLog is not. VoyageLog does not print books and does not track your route, so there is no route map to drop into a layout. If a printed book with a drawn route line is what you want, use one of the apps above. Our comparison of the best travel journal apps and the list of Polarsteps alternatives cover how they differ day to day.

The trade-off is that those apps work by keeping your trip on their service so the book can be built from it. If you chose a private, offline journal on purpose, the next two routes fit better.

Route 2: export a PDF, then print it yourself

This is the cheapest and most flexible route, and it works with any journal that can export a PDF.

What VoyageLog exports

VoyageLog exports a PDF per trip or per city. For a long trip, such as Rome, Naples and Amalfi in one go, split the trip into cities and export each as its own PDF. Short files are easier to print, easier to proofread and easier to give away one chapter at a time. You can also export a trip, a city or a best-of list as an image card, which suits a single sheet on a fridge or a wall.

Print at home

For a handful of pages, a home printer on A4 is enough. Turn off "fit to page" so nothing is rescaled, and print a single test page first. Photos look best on photo or matte coated paper, but plain paper is fine for a working draft.

Print at a print shop

Most copy shops take a PDF on a USB stick or by upload and print it in a few minutes. Ask for:

• double-sided printing, if you want a booklet feel
• a simple binding: staples along the fold, a spiral, or a thermal glue spine
• a slightly heavier paper for the cover

A printed PDF with a spiral binding costs far less than a custom photo book and looks like a real object.

Upload it to a photo book service

Many photo book companies accept a PDF or let you place images page by page. That gets you a hardbound book without redrawing every page, but check that the service accepts your page size and does not crop the edges.

Route 3: export your data and lay it out yourself

If you want a designed book, start from the raw material. VoyageLog exports JSON, Excel and a ZIP with media, and these exports of everything you saved are part of VoyageLog Pro.

• ZIP with media gives you your original photos and videos. This is what you want for sharp prints.
• Excel gives you every trip and entry as a spreadsheet: titles, dates, ratings, notes, tags. Sort it by date or by city, copy rows into a page template, and you have the text of the book.
• JSON is the full backup. It is also what you import on a new phone. For layout, it is the format for people comfortable with scripts.

A practical workflow: sort the Excel sheet by date, drop each entry into a template in a layout tool, and pair it with its photo from the ZIP. It takes a few evenings, not minutes, but every page is yours. This is how you get a book where a 5-star pizza in Rome gets a full page and a rainy Tuesday gets a line.

What survives printing, and what does not

Not everything on a phone screen translates to paper. The journal format we recommend, where an entry is a title, a rating, one line and one photo, happens to print very well.

Survives well:

• Ratings. Five stars next to a place are readable at a glance on paper.
• One-line notes. Short notes become captions. "Book the morning slot, the stained glass is best before noon" is a perfect caption.
• One photo per entry. A full-width photo with a title and a rating is a complete page.
• Dates and city grouping. These give the book its chapters.

Needs adjustment:

• Tags. Useful for searching, mostly noise on paper. Keep two or three, or drop them.
• Video. It cannot print. Pick a still frame or leave a note that it exists.
• Maps with live pins. A map link does not print. If the location matters, write the neighborhood or street under the title.
• Entries with no photo. Group them on a single "notes" page rather than giving each a blank half page.

Separating places (rated, revisitable) from moments (happened once, no rating) helps here too. Places become a recommendation list at the back of the book. Moments become the narrative in the middle. Our piece on places versus moments explains the split.

Practical tips before you print

Paper size

• A4 is the default for home printing and print shops. It is a good page for a full-width photo and a few lines of text.
• A5 (half an A4) makes a small, pleasant booklet and cuts the page count visually in half.
• In North America, Letter replaces A4.

Choose the size before you lay anything out. Rescaling a finished PDF is where crops and strange margins come from.

Photo resolution

Use original photos, not screenshots and not copies sent through a chat app, which compress images hard. Photos straight from a modern phone camera hold up on A4 and A5. The ZIP with media is the right source for anything printed large. If a photo looks soft on screen when you zoom in, it will look softer on paper.

Order: by date or by city

For a short trip, order by date. It matches memory. For a long trip with several stops, such as Prague, Vienna and Budapest, order by city and then by date inside each city. One chapter per city also lets you print one city alone as a small gift.

Proof one page first

Print a single page, hold it at arm's length and read the smallest text. Fix margins and font size before you print forty pages.

Which route should you take

• You want a glossy gift with almost no effort, and a route map is part of the appeal: use an app-native book from Polarsteps, Journi Print or FindPenguins.
• You want a cheap, tidy booklet: export PDFs per city and print them at a print shop.
• You want a designed book: export the ZIP and Excel, and lay it out yourself.

Whichever you pick, the printed book is only as good as the entries behind it. A rating, a line and a photo per place make a book that reads well. If you are starting a journal for your next trip, VoyageLog keeps everything on your phone and exports it when you are ready to print.