Photos and documents
You upload photos to a trip, and you keep documents with it. littledots treats those two differently all the way down: how they are ordered, where they are stored, and who can reach them.
Photos are the pictures you took: the view from the room, the meal, the street you got lost on. Documents are what you need on the day: the boarding pass, the booking confirmation, the scan of a reservation, the ticket somebody emailed you.
Each has a tab of its own on a trip, Photos and Documents. Both list the trip's own first, then a section for every itinerary item that has any. So you can put the boarding pass on the flight and the photos on the restaurant, and find them there later.
Photos
Adding photos
The last tile in a gallery is Add. On a phone it asks whether to take a photo or pick from your library; in a browser it opens the picker.
Photos go up to 25 MB each, video to 100 MB and a minute long. The app checks the size before it sends, so an oversize file is refused on your device rather than after a long upload. An upload that cannot finish waits in a queue that survives leaving the screen, closing the app and a hard refresh in a browser, and goes when you have signal again.
The order is when they were taken
A gallery runs oldest first, by the moment each photo was taken, and it has no sort control. There is nothing to arrange because the order is the order things happened in.
So the way to move a photo is to correct its date, which is a fact about the photo rather than a preference about one screen. Everywhere that photo appears follows along.
Correcting a photo's title, date and place
Open a photo, then its details, and you can correct the title, the date taken, the time taken and where this was taken. The details are also where you choose which part of the trip a photo is shown under.
- The line under a photo reads Taken when the photo arrived with a date of its own, and Uploaded when it did not. There is no switch for this. A photo with no date of its own gets the second word.
- An edited photo says so, and Hold to restore original puts back what the camera said. You never have to know the original to undo your change.
- A title is what a photo is called on screen. The filename is what it saves as, and titling a photo never renames the file.
Changing many photos in one go
Hold a photo to start selecting, then tap the rest. The bar along the bottom offers:
- Dates, either one date across the selection or a shift by an amount, which is what fixes a camera left on the wrong timezone.
- Title, one title across the selection. The field starts empty, and applying it empty clears the titles instead. The button says which it is about to do.
- Tag, to add tags to the selection or take them off.
- Cover for the trip, and Thumbnail where the selection is a video.
- Move, for showing photos under another part of the trip.
- Create, which turns the selection into a collage.
- Hold to delete, which counts what it is about to remove.
Every photo in one place
The Photos tab, beside Trips, holds the photos from every trip you are on. It shows them trip by trip, or all of them together, and you can search them and narrow them down by trip or by tag.
Tags are yours to make up. Mark the favorites, the ones for a photo book, the ones with the dog in them, and find them again later from any trip.
Collages
Pick a few photos and tap Create, and they open as a collage: scattered like prints on a table, or in a tidy grid. You can add flags, emoji and text, frame the photos as polaroids, and move and turn everything by hand. A finished collage is saved under Creations, and you can share it to the trip it came from so everybody on it sees it there.
Nothing is on your journal until you put it there
Open a photo and the pill at the top left reads On journal or Off journal. It is per photo, it starts off, and publishing a trip does not change it. What else a journal shows, and who can see it, is in Your public journal.
How photos are stored
Every photo is kept as you uploaded it, plus three smaller copies at 320, 960 and 1920 pixels along the longest edge. A grid of thumbnails pulls the small one and opening a photo pulls a large one, which is why a gallery of four hundred photos is quick on a phone.
They sit on an image host that answers without a login, because your journal has to serve them to people who do not have an account. Each address carries a long random piece, so it cannot be guessed, and nothing anywhere links to a photo you have not published. It is unlisted rather than locked: whoever you hand the link to can open it.
Documents
You can keep a document with the whole trip, or with one stop on the itinerary. The trip's own also appear under the trip note at Trip Details , so a document that belongs to the whole trip is one tap away rather than two.
You choose the order, or sort them
You arrange documents yourself. Drag a row to move it.
The sort button offers Newest first, Oldest first, A to Z and Z to A. The one in the toolbar reorders every document on the trip, items included, which it says before it runs, and it cannot be undone.
Renaming a document
You can rename a document, and the name it came in with is kept either way.
- Renaming edits the name only. The extension sits beside the field and is not editable, because it describes the bytes and is what your device reads to know how to open the thing.
- Uploaded as under a renamed document is the name it came in with, which never changes.
- Downloading saves it under the name you see.
Opening, downloading and deleting
Tapping a row opens a preview. Images and video play there on any platform, a PDF opens inline in a browser, and everything else hands off to whatever your device already opens that kind of file with.
The trash is a hold rather than a tap, so nothing stands between you and deleting a document except the half second it takes, and a brush of the thumb does nothing.
Documents are stored encrypted
Documents are encrypted before they are stored, and no smaller copies are made, because nothing publishes them. Opening one asks us for it, we decrypt it and hand it to you, so there is no address anybody else can hold. That is what the small lock on Documents means, and it is the other half of the split: a photo has to be servable to a journal and a boarding pass never does, so the two live in different places rather than in one place with a flag on some rows.
On a shared trip everyone sees the same photos and documents. Organizers and contributors can upload too, and guests only look. What happens to the ones you uploaded when you leave a trip or are removed from one is in Shared travel.
Keeping a trip on your phone for offline use
A trip's Details tab has an Offline card. Turn it on and the trip's documents are copied to the device, so a boarding pass opens in a plane or a border queue with no signal at all. Include photos keeps the photos too, at a size made for looking at on a phone rather than at full size.
Settings Device storage decides how much of this happens without you asking: only the trips you choose, the trips under way or starting within a month, or every trip you are on. It also shows what the app is keeping on the device, and lets you give the space back.
Storage quota
Everything you upload counts against one allowance, photos, documents and collages together, across every trip you have. It is two gigabytes unless we have given you more.
The allowance follows you rather than the trip. A photo you add to a trip somebody else organized counts against yours, and the photos your fellow travelers add to a trip of yours count against theirs.
Seeing what you have used
Settings Cloud storage shows how much is used and how much is left, split into photos, documents and collages, with everything you have uploaded under it, most recently uploaded first, so the big ones are findable without opening trip after trip. That list goes by when you uploaded something, not by when it was taken, so correcting a photo's date never moves it there.
Two things look alike and do different jobs. Deleting a photo or a document removes it and gives the space back in your account. Releasing what a trip keeps on your phone, at Settings Device storage , clears it off the phone and leaves the originals untouched, which frees space on the device and none in your account.
An upload that would put you over the line is refused before it is sent, so you find out straight away rather than after a long wait on a slow connection.
If you run out
Tell us. We would rather hear what you are working with and sort something out than have you delete the photos of one trip to make room for the next.