Help & how-to

Quick start

The three things to do on day one. Each takes about a minute.

1. Create your first trip. Click + New Trip at the top. Give it a name like "Italy 2026", a destination (e.g. "Florence, Italy"), and the dates. Save.
2. Add a couple of events. On the trip page, tap + Add event. Pick a kind — flight, lodging, reservation, activity, etc. — and fill in the details. Repeat for whatever you have.
3. Try the camera button. Tap 📸 Capture from photo and snap a picture of any printed ticket or confirmation. Bitácora will extract a draft event for you to review.

What Bitácora is (and isn't)

Bitácora is your travel logbook. It holds every reservation, every confirmation, every photo, every receipt, every "by the way, the WiFi password is…" — all in one place, organized by trip.

At the end of a trip, it can write a short prose memoir from what you logged. At the end of a year, it can compile a year-in-review hardback. While you're away, it can hand your house-sitter a single sheet with everything they need.

It is not:

• A booking site. It doesn't reserve flights or hotels. You book elsewhere; Bitácora keeps the record.
• A digital passport. Border officials don't accept anything from a website. You still pack the physical passport.
• A social network. Nothing is public. You decide what to share, with whom, by email.

Trips & events

Creating a trip

+ New Trip from the top of any page. You need three things:

• Name — what you'll call it. "Anniversary 2026", "Christmas in Bogotá", whatever feels right.
• Destination — where you're going. Try "Florence, Italy" or "St Augustine, Florida". Bitácora uses this to fetch weather and translate addresses for the daily cards.
• Dates — start and end. Inclusive of both days.

Optional but useful: currency (defaults to USD; set it to EUR for Europe so expense totals make sense), destination timezone (powers the "show the taxi driver" translations on the daily cards), and notes (anything that should appear on the binder cover).

Adding events

Once a trip exists, click into it and tap + Add event. Pick a kind:

• ✈️ Flight — boarding pass, leg of an itinerary
• 🏨 Lodging — hotel, Airbnb, the cabin your friend lent you
• 🚆 Transit — train, ferry, taxi reservation, rental car pickup
• 🎟️ Activity — museum tickets, walking tour, spa appointment
• 🍽️ Reservation — dinners, brunches, anything time-blocked
• 📄 Document — a paper attachment that doesn't fit elsewhere
• 📝 Note — open-ended reminder, no time required

Every event has a title, optional start/end times, a location (which gets translated on daily cards for non-English destinations), a confirmation number, and notes. You can also attach a PDF or photo to each event (boarding pass, hotel confirmation).

Editing & deleting

Click any event row to edit it. The trip detail page has Edit trip for renaming or changing dates, and a Delete button (with confirmation) on the trip itself. Deleting a trip also deletes its events, attachments, photos, memoir, and shares — there's no recycle bin.

Capture from a photo or PDF

Manually typing every confirmation is no fun. Bitácora can read most of it from a photo or a booking PDF, then ask you to review the draft before saving.

📸 Capture from a photo

1. On a trip page, tap 📸 Capture from photo.
2. Pick a photo from your phone, or use the camera button to snap one fresh. Aim at a printed boarding pass, hotel confirmation, museum ticket, handwritten itinerary — anything with trip-event details.
3. Upload. After a few seconds the Review screen opens with the extracted draft.
4. Edit anything that looks wrong, then Save to trip. Or Discard if it's not useful.

📄 Drop a PDF

Same page, second tab. A multi-leg flight confirmation (e.g. outbound + return) lands as two separate drafts, one per leg, each editable independently.

The capture queue

Drafts that haven't been saved or discarded sit in Captures (top user menu). A small badge shows the count. Each draft has a side-by-side view of the original image/PDF and the extracted fields.

Photos (moments)

"Moments" are trip-level photos — sunsets, dishes, the wing-view-from-seat-A. Different from event attachments (which are tied to a specific reservation and stay private).

Adding photos

On a trip page, tap 📷 Moments. Use the upload form to pick one or many photos. JPG, PNG, GIF, WebP, HEIC — all fine.

Captions

Under each photo there's a text field. Type a caption, tap ✓ to save. Captions show on the gallery and inside the lightbox.

Cover photo (★)

Click ☆ on any photo to mark it as the trip's cover. The cover photo:

• Renders as a big banner at the top of the trip detail page.
• Embeds on the binder PDF cover.
• Embeds on the Memory Book PDF cover.
• Picks up automatically on the year's Annual Passport cover.

Click ★ again to clear the cover.

Reordering

Photos appear chronologically by default (Bitácora reads the "taken at" date from each photo's EXIF). If you want a different order — drag any photo to a new spot. The order sticks.

Lightbox

Click any photo to open a fullscreen viewer. Arrow keys cycle through. Escape (or click the backdrop) closes.

Weather, conflicts & gaps

The trip detail timeline isn't just a list of what you've added. Bitácora layers three kinds of signal on top.

⛅ Weather forecast

Each day shows a chip with high/low temperatures, condition (mostly sunny, partly cloudy, rain, etc.), and a precipitation percentage when chance is 30% or higher. Forecasts are pulled from a free source (Open-Meteo) and refresh every 6 hours.

Forecasts only go out about 16 days, so for a trip that's further away you'll see weather fill in as the date approaches. If the destination is hard to geocode (e.g. a complex itinerary with arrows), Bitácora tries to resolve a country or main city from it.

⚠️ Conflict warnings

A banner appears above the timeline when Bitácora notices anything tight:

• Less than 30 minutes between two events at different locations.
• An event that overlaps a previous one.
• A hotel check-out scheduled after the next event starts.
• A flight-to-flight layover under 45 minutes.
• An event with end time before start time (likely a typo).

Each warning appears inline next to the offending event so you know exactly what triggered it. Adjust the times — or add a buffer — and the warning disappears.

⏳ Gap finder & ✨ AI suggestions

When a day has a 3-hour-plus stretch of unplanned daytime (8 AM – 8 PM), Bitácora shows a small ⏳ chip with the time range. If you'd like ideas to fill that gap, tap ✨ Suggest — Co-Captain reads your destination, the nearby events, and proposes 2-4 grounded activities. Tap ✨ Refresh to regenerate, × to clear.

Travel documents

Bitácora doesn't replace your physical passport or visa — you still pack them. What it does is track expiries and nudge you about what an upcoming trip needs.

Adding a document

User menu → Documents → + Add document. Pick a kind (passport, visa, Global Entry, vaccination, insurance, driver's license, frequent flyer, other), give it a label, and add an expiry date. The expiry is the part that really matters.

You can also store the number (passport number, visa control number, etc.). It's encrypted at rest when the admin has set up an encryption key. If you'd rather not store it at all, leave the field blank — everything else still works.

Per-trip checklist

Every international trip (destinations outside the US) shows a collapsible pre-departure checklist banner at the top of the timeline. It looks at your documents and ticks each item ✓ if you have one that's valid past the trip's end date.

Expiry warnings

On the Documents page, anything expiring within 90 days shows an amber warning. Anything already expired shows red. Renew before your next international trip.

Expenses & budget

Every trip has a 💰 Expenses page. Set a budget, log expenses as you go, and see what's left.

Setting a budget

On the trip's Expenses page there's a "Trip budget" field. Enter a number in the trip's currency (set on the trip itself). The progress bar at the top fills as you log spending — green while you're under budget, amber as you approach, red if you go over.

Adding expenses

Each expense has a label, amount, currency, category (lodging, transit, food, activities, shopping, other), the date paid, and optional notes. Mix currencies freely: a USD taxi receipt on a EUR trip converts automatically via daily exchange rates.

Glance chip on the trip detail

As soon as you have one expense logged, the trip detail page shows a small 💰 glance chip at the top: total spent so far, budget used, percent. Tap "view all" to jump to the full page.

Currency cheat sheet in the binder

For trips with a non-USD destination currency, the printed binder includes a conversion ladder ($1 / $5 / $10 / $20 / $50 / $100 ↔ destination currency) so you can do quick mental math at a market without pulling out your phone.

Sharing a trip

Trips are private by default. To share one, open the trip and tap Share.

Two access levels

• Family view (read-only). They can see your plans, photos, and printable binder/cards. They can't change anything. Good for adult kids who want to know "when does Mom land?" without being able to mess with the itinerary.
• Co-planner. Full edit access — they can add events, upload photos, edit titles, etc. Good for a spouse or a co-traveler. Not for casual family — they'd be able to delete things.

What if they haven't signed up yet?

You can share with any email. If that person doesn't have a Bitácora account yet, the share waits — when an admin issues them an invite and they sign up, the shares activate automatically. They'll see the shared trip on their first login.

What's NOT shared

• Document numbers, alarm codes, WiFi passwords from the household sheet — sharing a trip never exposes any of those.
• Co-Captain chats — your chat history is yours alone, even with a co-planner.
• Memory Book, Annual Passport, Sitter sheet — all owner-only by default. Family-view shares can read the memoir prose (when one exists) but not edit it.

Household & sitter sheet

Set up your household info once, generate a "while we're away" PDF for every trip after.

Filling in household info

User menu → Household. Fields cover:

• House-sitter (name, phone, email)
• Trusted neighbor (name, phone)
• Vet contact + pet care instructions
• Plant / garden care
• Mail hold dates / details
• Alarm code (encrypted)
• WiFi network + password (encrypted)
• Free-form notes ("trash day is Wednesday")

Empty sections just get skipped on the printed sheet.

Per-trip sitter sheet

Every trip page has a 🏠 Sitter sheet button. Click it to download a PDF with:

• Trip name + destination + the exact dates you'll be away
• Your contact info (sitter knows where you are)
• All the household info from above
• A "discard after our return" footer (so the sitter knows it's confidential)

Emailing the sheet directly

Right next to the PDF button there's a 📧 Email sitter button. It emails the PDF to whatever sitter address you saved on the Household page. (If your admin hasn't fully wired email yet, you'll see a "would be sent" message — the PDF is ready, you just need to download and forward it manually for now.)

Travel binder PDF

The big one. 📄 Print binder on any trip produces a complete PDF you can print and bind:

• Cover with trip name, destination, dates, and your cover photo (if set)
• Table of contents
• Currency cheat sheet for non-USD trips
• Day-by-day pages with every event, weather, locations, confirmation numbers, notes
• Emergency contact wallet card at the back

Print it at home or at a FedEx and slip it into a 3-ring binder. Mom and Dad have been printing these and bringing them on every trip.

🎫 Daily index cards

🎫 Daily cards on a trip produces a printable sheet with one wallet-sized card per trip day. Cut along the dashed lines and tuck one in your bag each day.

Each card has:

• Day name + day-of-trip ("DAY 3 OF 12")
• Today's weather
• Where you're staying (with the address in the local language)
• A "show the taxi driver" phrase ("Per favore, mi porti a:" for Italian, etc.)
• Day's reservations and times
• Emergency numbers (local 911-equivalent, your home contact)

📖 Memory Book

A short prose memoir of your trip — warm, first-person, drawn from your events, photos, and notes. Edit it, lock it, export it as a softcover-ready PDF.

How it works

1. On a trip page, tap 📖 Memory Book.
2. First time: empty state with a ✨ Generate first draft button. Click it. Co-Captain reads everything on the trip and writes ~500-800 words of prose.
3. The draft appears in an editable textarea. Read it, fix anything that's off — Claude doesn't always get tone right, and that's the point of you editing.
4. Save draft to keep your edits. ✨ Regenerate if you want to start fresh.
5. When you're happy, 📄 Export PDF. The PDF has a cover (with your cover photo if set), drop-cap opening, justified prose, colophon page.

When to generate

After the trip is best — Bitácora pulls from whatever you've logged. The more events, photos with captions, and notes you have, the richer the memoir. A sparse trip will get a short, honest memoir; it never invents details.

Reading it for someone else

Family-view recipients see the rendered memoir on the same page (formatted as a magazine-style article). They can export the PDF too. Only the owner can edit or regenerate.

📕 Annual Passport

A year-end recap hardback. Stats + Claude-drafted year-in-review prose + a trip-by-trip roster. Christmas-gift-worthy.

How it works

1. User menu → Annual Passport.
2. You'll see a card per year that has trips in it.
3. Click a year. The Stats grid shows up immediately (computed from your data — trips taken, days abroad, countries, flights, total spend in USD).
4. If you haven't drafted yet: ✨ Generate first draft. Co-Captain weaves every trip in the year into one narrative, pulling specifics from each trip's Memory Book when one exists.
5. Edit the prose. When the year is over, hit 🔒 Lock to freeze it — gives the artifact stability so a printed copy stays canonical even if you go back and add an old trip.
6. 📄 Export hardback PDF gives you an 8×10in book-feeling PDF with cover, stats page, trip roster, drop-cap year-in-review, colophon.

Cover photo

The Annual Passport automatically picks the cover from the first trip in the year that has a cover photo set. So just mark one photo per trip as cover, and your year's passport gets a hero image for free.

💬 Co-Captain (trip chat)

Ask anything about a specific trip and get a grounded answer. Co-Captain knows your trip's destination, dates, events, document expiries, and any Memory Book text — but it doesn't know about other trips, your finances, or anything private.

Good questions to start with

• "What's the tipping norm at restaurants in [destination]?"
• "Are any of my documents expiring before this trip?"
• "What should I pack for [month] in [destination]?"
• "Roughly how much per day will dinner cost?"
• "I have 4 unplanned hours Tuesday afternoon — any suggestions?"

How it works

On a trip page, tap 💬 Co-Captain. Type a question, hit Send. Replies stream in token by token (you'll see them appear). The whole conversation is saved per trip; refresh anytime and the history is still there. Clear wipes the conversation for that trip.

What it won't do

It won't make up specific business names ("dinner at Trattoria del Toro" — only if it's a place it actually knows about) or invent events for your trip. It won't tell you your passport number — it only knows that you have one and when it expires. And it can be wrong about visa rules, medical info, or legal questions — never use it for those. Check official sources.

AI cost tracking

Every AI call gets logged with an estimated USD cost. On the Account page you'll see a breakdown showing this month and lifetime spend, broken down by feature:

• Address translation (Daily Index Cards)
• Photo capture
• PDF capture
• Memory Book draft
• Annual Passport draft
• Trip co-captain chat
• Gap-filler suggestions

Pricing reflects Anthropic's actual per-token rates. Typical monthly spend for active use is well under $5.

Turning AI features off

The Account page has an "AI features" toggle. Flip it off and:

• The 📸 Capture, 📄 PDF drop, 📖 Memory Book, 📕 Annual Passport, 💬 Co-Captain, and ✨ Gap Suggest buttons stop offering AI generation.
• Address translation on daily cards stops — addresses print as you typed them.
• No data is sent to Anthropic.

Everything else (trips, events, photos, expenses, sharing, printable PDFs without AI content) keeps working exactly as before. Flip it back on whenever.

Flow: planning a new trip from scratch

1. + New Trip. Name, destination, dates. Save.
2. Open the new trip. The pre-departure checklist banner appears for international destinations — verify your passport is on file with a valid-past-trip-end expiry.
3. Add your flights via 📄 Drop a PDF (the airline confirmation will produce both legs as separate drafts). Review each, save.
4. Add lodging via 📸 Capture from photo (snap the confirmation email if you have a printed copy, or just + Add event manually).
5. Add big-ticket reservations: dinners, tours, museums.
6. Set the trip's currency and destination timezone (especially for Europe / Asia / Latin America — this powers the dual-clock and the daily-card translations).
7. Open the Expenses page, enter a budget so the trip detail glance chip works while you're traveling.
8. Make sure your Household info is up to date for the sitter sheet.
9. About a week before the trip: print the Travel binder, print the Daily index cards.

Flow: the day of travel

1. Email the sitter sheet: 🏠 Sitter sheet → 📧 Email sitter.
2. Pack your printed binder and that day's index card.
3. While in transit: any new tickets you pick up (a paper museum pass, a reservation card), snap a photo and feed it to 📸 Capture from photo to add it to your itinerary.
4. At dinner, log the expense from your phone (Expenses → Add expense).
5. Take photos. Upload them to the trip's Moments page when you get back to the hotel, or post-trip — Bitácora reads the photo's date stamp to sort chronologically.

Flow: coming home from a trip

1. Upload any leftover photos to Moments. Caption your favorites. Mark one as the cover ★.
2. Reconcile expenses — receipts you might still have lying around.
3. Open 📖 Memory Book on the trip. ✨ Generate first draft. Read what Claude wrote — does it match what you remember? Edit anything that's off.
4. 📄 Export PDF to keep a copy on your computer. Email it to whoever was on the trip with you.

Flow: Memory Book as a Christmas gift

Mom and Dad took a 10th-anniversary trip; you want to give them a bound copy of the memoir as a holiday gift.

1. Make sure the trip is fully captured in Bitácora (events, photos with captions, a cover photo).
2. Open the Memory Book, generate a draft, edit it carefully.
3. Export the PDF.
4. Take it to a print-on-demand service (Lulu, Blurb, Mixbook — any will work). Upload the PDF, pick softcover or hardback, order one copy.
5. Ships in about a week. Wrap and gift.

Flow: year-end Annual Passport

1. Around Christmas, all trips in the year should be in Bitácora. Any missing? Add them now.
2. For each trip you'd like featured prominently, make sure there's a Memory Book draft (it doesn't have to be polished, but the year-in-review pulls excerpts from it).
3. Mark a cover photo on at least one trip — the Annual Passport will use it on the cover.
4. Open Annual Passport → the current year → ✨ Generate first draft.
5. Edit the year-in-review prose. Add color where the AI was too generic.
6. On January 1st (or whenever you're done), tap 🔒 Lock. This freezes the artifact so a printed copy stays canonical.
7. Export the hardback PDF. Order a copy from a print-on-demand service. It's a slim hardback — perfect for the living-room bookshelf year after year.

Privacy & your data

Who can see what

• Only you by default. Trips, events, photos, documents, expenses, household info, chat history.
• People you've shared with can see the trip you shared (read-only for family view, full edit for co-planner) — but not your documents, household, expenses, chat, or any other trips.
• The admin (your invite issuer) has user management and can see signups, but does not have access to the contents of your trips.

The AI provider

When you use an AI feature (capture, Memory Book, Co-Captain, etc.), the relevant text or image is sent to Anthropic's Claude API. That's the only third party that sees any of your content. You can turn AI off on the Account page; no AI features run while it's off.

Encryption

Document numbers, alarm codes, and WiFi passwords are encrypted on disk when the server has an encryption key configured. Until that's set up by the admin, those fields are stored in plain text — fine while the app is a small family pilot, but worth verifying before storing truly sensitive numbers.

Where the data lives

Everything is on a single private server on Fly.io (Ashburn, Virginia). Database is SQLite, photos and PDFs sit on a private encrypted volume. Daily snapshots. No third-party analytics, no ad networks, no cookies beyond what you need to stay logged in.

FAQ

Something broke?

If a page errors out, the easiest first step: refresh. If the error persists:

• Take a screenshot of what you were doing and the error message.
• Note the URL you were on.
• Email Amanda (or text — same person) with both. She'll check the server logs to see what crashed.

Bitácora is family-built; nobody is on call 24/7. But it's small enough that real bugs get fixed fast.