I built this project as a personal travel journal that turns a New Zealand road trip into an interactive map experience. Instead of a static photo album, the goal was to let people explore the journey geographically: where we went, what we saw, and how the route unfolded over time.

A key technical decision was to separate map interaction from media hosting. The app uses React + TypeScript for the UI and Mapbox for the mapping layer, while photos are hosted in Cloudinary to keep bundle size down and leverage CDN delivery. To connect photos to locations, image metadata was extracted and transformed into a static JSON mapping between coordinates and assets, creating a simple but reliable data pipeline for rendering trip points on the map.

I optimized for practicality over complexity: a Vite-based frontend, static data, and a straightforward architecture that is easy to maintain and extend. The result is a lightweight, visually engaging travel app that balances storytelling with technical clarity.