Macaco: Minimalist Trip Diary - Roam freely. Forget nothing.

I started Macaco because I kept losing my own travel notes. After a New Year's cruise, I went to write it all up and realized the notes were scattered across a notes app, a few text files, and photos that never made it off my phone before I lost or replaced it. I wanted one place that actually survived device changes — not a local notes app that dies with the phone. The problem I was solving was pretty narrow at first: sync entries across devices so I wouldn't lose them again. But building it, I realized the bigger risk wasn't losing the text — it was losing the photos. Most journal apps store images locally, so a factory reset or a lost phone quietly erases the visual memory of a trip even if the words survive. So Macaco backs photos up to your own Google Drive automatically, not just to some app-controlled server you have to trust. My approach changed a lot along the way. It started as "Wanderlog," a fairly simple local journal. Once I moved it to Firebase for real cloud sync, I realized entries needed to feel alive beyond just text and photos, so I added short video clips you can attach to an entry — a few seconds is often more honest about a place than a paragraph. Somewhere in there the whole thing got renamed to Macaco, partly to reflect that it had become a genuinely different app from where it started. Would love feedback from anyone who journals, travels a lot, or has ever lost photos/notes to a dead or wiped phone — that's exactly who I built this for.