1. Go to Trips → New trip.
2. Name it "Tanzania 2026", set start/end dates, pick who it's for (A, B or both), add a short summary.
3. Save. You now have an empty trip you can attach pins and legs to.

1. Open the Map and click each location in order: Kilimanjaro airport, Arusha, Serengeti camp 1, camp 2, Zanzibar…
2. For each pin set a date (the day you arrive), who it's for, and choose the trip you just made from the Trip dropdown.
3. Tip: if you don't know exact coordinates, search by name in the map search box, then click Drop pin here.

A leg is the travel between two pins — a flight, drive, train, ferry or walk. Legs draw lines on the map and build the trip timeline.

1. Open the trip in Trips.
2. In the Legs section click Add leg.
3. Pick the From and To pins, the mode of travel (flight / drive / ferry / etc.), date, and optionally duration or a note.
4. Repeat for each hop: Kilimanjaro → Arusha (drive), Arusha → Serengeti (drive), Serengeti → Zanzibar (flight), Zanzibar → mainland (ferry), mainland → home (flight).

1. From any pin or the trip view, open Journal and add an entry dated to that day.
2. Write in plain words — even just bullet points. You can come back later.
3. When you're home, hit Polish with AI (see the AI polish section below) to turn your notes into a readable diary entry.

• Duplicate as template — in a trip's menu, clone the structure (pins + legs, no journal) to start a similar route.
• Build from flight confirmation — paste a confirmation email and PinDrops will extract the flights, create airport pins and add the legs for you.

1. Click download the template (or open Trips → Import CSV and use the link inside the modal).
2. Open it in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers, or any text editor.
3. It has two complete example trips — Tanzania safari and Japan in spring — so you can see the shape.

The template uses the simple format, which is as close to "list your trip on a napkin" as possible:

• type — trip for a trip header row, pin (or stop) for each place you're visiting.
• trip — the trip name. Every pin in the same trip just repeats the same name here; PinDrops groups them automatically.
• name — the trip's title on a trip row, or the place name on a pin row (e.g. "Serengeti National Park").
• start_date / end_date — ISO dates (YYYY-MM-DD).
• who — a, b, or both. Leave blank to default to both.
• status — trip row: planned / completed / idea. Pin row: visited / wishlist.
• mode — on a pin row, how you got there from the previous pin in the same trip. flight / drive / train / bus / boat / walk. The first pin in a trip has no mode (it's where you start).
• notes — free text.

That's it. No lat/lng, no pin refs, no leg rows. PinDrops figures all of that out.

When you import, the browser sends each place name to OpenStreetMap's Nominatim to look up its coordinates. You'll see a progress line in the preview like "Geocoding 3 / 8: Serengeti National Park".

• Geocoding is rate-limited to 1 request per second (Nominatim's fair-use policy), so 10 pins takes about 11 seconds.
• If a place can't be found (e.g. typo, or a vague name like "the beach"), it's flagged in the preview with "could not geocode". You can fix the spelling in your CSV and re-import, or add a country to disambiguate.
• Adding a country code or country name makes geocoding much more accurate — "Cambridge" is ambiguous, "Cambridge, UK" is not. You can append it to the place name, or add a country column to your CSV.
• If you already know the coordinates, add lat and lng columns to your CSV and PinDrops will use those instead of geocoding.

On the simple format, PinDrops creates a leg from one pin to the next in row order, whenever the second pin has a mode value. So:

pin,Tanzania 2026,Arusha,2026-09-01,2026-09-02,,,,Start
pin,Tanzania 2026,Serengeti,2026-09-03,2026-09-07,,,drive,
pin,Tanzania 2026,Zanzibar,2026-09-10,2026-09-14,,,flight,

…becomes Arusha → Serengeti (drive) → Zanzibar (flight). After import, open the trip and you can edit, reorder or delete legs exactly like any other trip.

If you export your existing trips with Trips → Export CSV, you'll get a richer file with 25 columns: trip_ref, pin_ref, lat, lng, country_code, tags, rating, kind, from_pin_ref, to_pin_ref, and so on. The importer auto-detects that format too — any header containing trip_ref or pin_ref is treated as advanced. This is useful for round-tripping an existing library, tweaking in Sheets, and re-importing.

If you just want to add trips by hand, stick with the simple format — it's a lot less fiddly.

1. Go to Trips and click Import CSV.
2. Pick the file. A preview modal parses it in the browser and shows a tree of every trip, pin and leg it found.
3. If any pins need geocoding, the preview updates place-by-place as Nominatim returns results.
4. Warnings (geocode failures, missing names, etc.) are highlighted in amber.
5. Hit Import. Everything is inserted in a single atomic batch on the server.

• 500 trips, 5,000 pins and 5,000 legs max per import.
• Pins without a trip (or whose trip row is missing) import as untripped pins — they show up on the map but aren't attached to any trip.
• Re-importing the same file creates new trips — this is an add-only tool, not an update-by-id.
• Spreadsheets sometimes mangle leading zeros or very precise lat/lng when they save — if that happens, save as plain CSV/UTF-8 and avoid letting Excel "auto-format" the lat/lng columns.

In March 2025 Google locked the Photos Library API to only show apps their own uploads, so third-party apps can no longer browse your library. The drag-drop importer gives you the same outcome without depending on any Google API that might disappear tomorrow.

1. Go to the Gallery tab. You'll see a storage meter at the top (how much of the 10 GB R2 free tier you've used) and a dropzone below it.
2. Drag a folder of photos anywhere onto the Gallery view, or click Import folder… to pick one.
3. For each file, in the browser:
   • EXIF is read to grab GPS coordinates and the date/time the photo was taken.
   • HEIC files (iPhone) are converted to JPEG on the fly.
   • The image is resized to the max dimension set in Settings (default 2048 px on the longest edge) and re-encoded as JPEG.
   • A SHA-256 hash of the resized bytes is computed for dedup.
   • Each photo is matched to the nearest pin: within 500 m preferentially, and whose trip dates cover the photo day.
4. The preview modal lists every file with its thumbnail, the matched pin (if any), and the original → resized size. Untick anything you don't want.
5. Hit Import selected. The files upload to R2 and the gallery fills up.

Originals never leave your device — only the resized copies are uploaded.

R2's free tier is 10 GB. At the default 2048 px / JPEG q82, that's roughly 33,000 photos before you start paying Cloudflare anything.

• Open Settings → Photos to change the max dimension (1600 / 2048 / 2560 / 3200 px) and JPEG quality (70 / 82 / 90%).
• Smaller max dimension = more photos per GB but less detail when you zoom into the lightbox.
• Changing these settings only affects new imports — existing photos aren't re-encoded.
• The storage meter on the Gallery page turns amber at 75% and red at 92% of the free tier so you see it coming.

• Each uploaded photo is identified by a content hash, so re-running the importer on the same folder is a no-op — duplicates are recognised and skipped.
• If the existing photo isn't attached to a pin yet, the dedup path will still attach it to a matching pin on the re-run.
• This means you can safely import folders that partially overlap (e.g. a shared trip folder that both of you have copies of).

• Screenshots, screen recordings and photos that have been edited in some apps often have their EXIF stripped. Those photos show up in the preview as no GPS in EXIF.
• Photos with GPS but no pin within 5 km appear as GPS found, no pin within 5 km. Import them anyway and attach them manually later, or create a pin at that location and re-run the importer.
• HEIC files that heic2any can't decode are marked as errors and skipped — that's rare, usually only on very old iOS exports.