A private hiking journal for iPhone. Your photos already know where you went and when — Monolog turns them into a record you own.
Questions, bugs, or ideas:
Written by one person, so replies take a day or two.
Point Monolog at a hike's photos and it reads the dates and locations your camera saved into them, then assembles a trip: when you went, roughly where, how long you were out, and the pictures themselves. From there you can add notes, record a voice memo, or correct anything it got wrong.
If you have a GPX or FIT file from a watch or another app, you can attach it to a trip to add the route line, distance, and elevation profile. That step is optional — a trip works without one.
It reads the date and location stored inside your photos, which is how trips get built without you filling in a form. Nothing is copied out of your library and nothing is uploaded. You can also grant access to selected photos only, in Settings under Privacy & Security, though Monolog will only see the hikes you pick.
Location is only saved into a photo if your camera had it at the moment you shot it, and it gets stripped when a photo is sent through a messaging app or saved as a screenshot. A photo without a location still carries its date, so it can join a trip — you can name the place yourself.
Monolog points at photos in your library rather than keeping its own copies. If a photo is deleted from the library, it stops appearing in the trip. Check Recently Deleted in Photos; restoring it there brings it back in Monolog.
Because it never uses live GPS. It doesn't track your hike as you walk. Every coordinate it knows about came from a photo you took.
Yes. Create the trip and fill in the details by hand, or attach a GPX or FIT file if you have one.
They ride along in your iPhone's normal backup to iCloud or your computer, so restoring a device restores your trips. There is no separate Monolog account or cloud sync — trips do not travel between devices on their own.
They go with it, since they live only on your device. Your photos are unaffected. If you plan to reinstall, restore from a backup rather than deleting and starting over.
Monolog has no accounts, no analytics, and no server of mine. The full details, including the two places where information does leave your phone, are in the privacy policy.