📸 Travel Journal

"Don't just take photos. Tell a story."

Travel Journal is a smart Android application that turns your camera roll into a living, breathing travel log. By leveraging Geolocation, Google Maps, and Generative AI, it organizes your memories, maps your journey, and even writes the captions for you.

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🚀 Key Features

📍 Travel Mapping

Automatically pins your uploaded photos to an interactive map based on their geospatial metadata. See exactly where every memory happened.

🎬 Movie Mode (Time-Warp Storytelling)

Select a "trio" of your favorite moments, and Travel Journal stitches them into a cinematic highlight reel with background music.

📒 Digital Scrapbook

A nostalgic, auto-generated collage mode that arranges your photos into beautiful layouts with customizable backgrounds.

🧠 AI-Powered Context

• Auto-Captioning: The app sends your images to our backend, where the Llama 3 model (via Groq) analyzes the scene and generates witty, descriptive captions.
• Smart Caching: To save costs and speed up load times, captions are cached in MongoDB. If you view a memory twice, it loads instantly from the cache.

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🛠 Tech Stack & Architecture

We built Travel Journal as a Full-Stack Kotlin Monolith, ensuring type safety and consistency from the UI all the way to the database.

📱 Android Client (The Face)

• Language: Kotlin (100%)
• UI Framework: Jetpack Compose (Modern, declarative UI toolkit)
• Maps: Google Maps SDK for Android (Composable Maps library)
• Networking: Retrofit & OkHttp (For communicating with the backend)
• Async Processing: Kotlin Coroutines (For non-blocking background tasks like image uploading)
• Image Loading: Coil (Coroutines Image Loader)

☁️ Backend Server (The Brain)

• Framework: Spring Boot 3 (Kotlin)
• Database: MongoDB (NoSQL storage for flexibility with image metadata)
• AI Engine: Groq API (Running Llama 3 for ultra-fast inference)
• Tunneling: ngrok (Exposes localhost to the Android device securely)

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⚡ Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Android Studio (Koala or newer)
• IntelliJ IDEA (Recommended for Backend)
• MongoDB (Local or Atlas)
• ngrok account

1. Backend Setup

1. Open the backend/ folder in IntelliJ or any desired IDE.
2. Create a .env file in src/main/resources (or set Environment Variables in Run Configuration):

   MONGO_URI=mongodb+srv://<user>:<pass>@cluster.mongodb.net/journaldb
   GROQ_API_KEY=gsk_your_groq_api_key_here
   PORT=8080

3. Run JournAIApplication.kt.
4. Expose port 8080: ngrok http 8080. Copy the forwarded URL (e.g., https://a1b2.ngrok-free.app).

2. Client Setup

1. Open the client/ folder in Android Studio.
2. Navigate to utils/Constants.kt (or wherever BASE_URL is defined).
3. Paste your ngrok URL:

   const val BASE_URL = "[https://a1b2.ngrok-free.app/api/](https://a1b2.ngrok-free.app/api/)"

4. Sync Gradle and run on an Emulator or Physical Device.

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👥 Contributors

This project was built with ❤️ by:

• Kushi
• Joshua
• Louise
• Siddhesh
• Rachit

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