Your Guide To Creating A Travel Photo Diary

Whether you’re writing in a personal diary or your blog, travel photo diaries are a wonderful way to preserve an experience and are fairly simple to create. The first photo diary that I ever published on Slow Boat Library was from my trip to Aix-en-Provence in July of 2018. Since then, I’ve made seven or so other ‘photo diary’ posts and have been overwhelmed by the response.

Throughout these posts, I experimented with the structure and form; figuring out what looked best, what aesthetic each one portrays, what to include and so on. I’m happy with all of them and genuinely enjoy pulling up an old post every once in a while and reliving it.

A travel photo diary is also pretty fun to write. In the same way that you get to relive your adventures when you reread these entires, you get to relive it as your writing it down. Choosing what photos to include, explaining what your trip entailed and what was most meaningful to you. There’s a lot of creative freedom in travel photo diaries. I, myself, tend to get a bit poetic with the introduction. Case and point:

Little stars would twinkle in the town below, as the darkness settled in. They shined against the mountain below us, giving the impression that the mountain was one giant geode, and we were getting a glimpse of the gems within.

Photo Diary: A Weekend In A Mongolian Yurt

For those who might want to make their own travel photo diary, I decided to quickly breakdown the structure that I prefer to use

The Intro

I usually start the post with the text. I like to first lay out where I went, for how long, and all those sort of boring details. But then I try to describe how that trip made me feel, what left an impression on me, and any trials or tribulations that I faced along the way. I keep it short for the most part, never really exceeding four or five paragraphs. Put some emotion into your description and make it something that you will enjoy in the future.

The Photos

Below the text, comes the photos. The nice thing about photo diaries is that they are short and sweet, but also can be very emotional and valuable. They can be an easy way to add content to your website/blog, precisely because they are short and tend to be more engaging. That’s why I’m pretty specific about which photos to include, only adding around fifteen photos per post.

The photos I include are usually my most impressive (in terms of photo quality) and ones that show me, my friends, and my family. Since I primarily travel alone, I always like accentuating their company. These are some photos that I’ve used in previous travel photo diaries:

Tokyo

San Francisco, ft. my friend Christina.

Venice

Tying It Up

At the very end of your post, immediately after the photos, I like to include a little blip to sum it all up. Tying it up with a quote about the city you visited, your favorite part from all of it, a simple explanation about why this trip meant so much to you, your plans for similar trips, or just what’s up next in your life. Keep it positive 🙂

Little Details

If you are making a travel diary for your website or blog, try to stick to a theme with the titles. For example, I always title my diaries beginning with, “Photo Diary: _.” I also make sure the post is tagged and categorized to go into appropriate pages, such as my main page for travels and their location page (ie – France or the USA.) This will help your users find the pages and explore others like it.

---

There you have it. I hope this inspired you to create your own travel photo diary, even if it’s from a trip seven years past, and showed you how simple it can be! If any of you do publish any travel photo diary posts, I’d love to read them. Please leave them in the comments below!

Blessings,

Elena x