Keeping a Turkey Trip Log That Survives Dead Batteries

On the last week of March I did Istanbul to Göreme and back with two phones, a power bank that turned out to hold about half what its sticker claimed, and a 2019 ThinkPad I left at the hotel. The symptom was mundane: my trip notes were spread across a voice-memo app, a camera SD card, and a notebook page photographed at bad angles, and by day three I could not tell whether the “blue door” I wrote about was in Balat or in Ürgüp. Around 400 photos and maybe 60 scribbled lines, no single timeline.

What I did instead of buying a better app: one plain-text file per day, named for the date, synced by a folder I already had. Nothing clever. I set the phone camera to write the date into the filename, which most stock camera apps will do in settings, and I moved photos into the day folder each evening with a short script on the laptop:

#!/bin/sh
# usage: ./ingest.sh 2025-03-27 ~/DCIM/Camera
day="$1"; src="$2"
mkdir -p "$HOME/trip/$day"
find "$src" -type f -newermt "$day" ! -newermt "$day 23:59:59" \
  -exec mv -n {} "$HOME/trip/$day/" \;

It is dumb and it works. The -newermt filter uses the file mtime, which on Android is usually the capture time but not always after a copy. I also kept a single log.md where each entry is one line, timestamp first:

2025-03-27T18:40 Balat, blue door on Vodina Cd, coffee 40 TL, closed Mondays

One line per thing I might want later, written in the evening from memory while looking at the photos. No tags, no YAML, no links. The photo filenames carry the rest.

Why this shape: the failure mode I was fixing was not “I need a richer tool,” it was “I stop writing when the tool asks me to decide where things go.” A date-named folder and a timestamped line have no decisions. The cost is that search is just grep and I cannot see a map. I accepted that; I looked at locations once, on the last day, and did not need them during the trip.

The place this breaks: daylight saving and timezone changes. Turkey has stayed on one offset, but my phone’s clock and the camera’s clock disagreed by about four minutes, enough to put a late-evening shot in the wrong day folder once. I now set the camera clock from the phone before the first day, and I do not trust -newermt across a copy from an SD card, since copying resets mtime unless you preserve it. On a previous trip I used rsync -a and that kept the original times; plain cp did not, and I spent an hour sorting photos by hand. Also, if you write the log only at night, a day with a 5 a.m. balloon pickup gets a thin entry. I started writing the pickup line the night before.

One question I have not settled: for people who do keep a trip log over multiple trips, do you keep one growing file or a folder per trip? I have been doing a folder per trip, but the old entries are effectively invisible to me now.