To make a year-in-travel recap, go through the year in your Photos app trip by trip, write down a handful of numbers (countries, new countries, cities, days away, flights), choose one photo for each trip, and put it together as a carousel, a short video or a printed page. An evening with your photo library is usually enough, and the numbers are half the fun.
Step 1: find every trip
Your phone remembers more than you do.
- Browse your library by year and month. Trips stand out as bursts of photos in unfamiliar places.
- Look at your photos on a map. It shows the places at a glance, including the weekend you forgot. See how to see your photos on a map on iPhone.
- Search by place. Typing a city or country name into the Photos search finds the pictures taken there, if they have a location.
- Fill gaps from elsewhere: your calendar, booking emails, your airline account, and Google Maps Timeline if you use it.
Write a simple list: month, place, number of days. Menus in the Photos app move between iOS versions, but browsing by year, a map and search have been there for years.
Step 2: count what matters
Pick five or six numbers. More than that and nobody reads them.
| Number | How to get it |
|---|---|
| Countries this year | From your trip list. Decide first whether a layover counts |
| New countries | Compare with your all-time list; first visits are the headline |
| Cities | Count the places you slept, or every place you photographed |
| Days away | Add up the trips; the days-in-country calculator totals per country |
| Flights and kilometers | Add each flight in the flight distance tool |
| A first | The first night train, the first time above the Arctic Circle |
For the counting rules, see how to count the days you've spent in each country and how far have you flown. Be consistent with last year, so the numbers compare.
Step 3: choose one photo per trip
The hardest step, and the one that makes the recap. A few rules of thumb:
- People over postcards. A friend laughing at a market beats the famous view everyone has.
- Different every time. If three trips are all beaches at sunset, pick a street, a meal or a train window for two of them.
- One "behind the scenes" shot. The 5 a.m. airport, the soaked map, the car that broke down. It makes the rest believable.
- Then add three extras for the start, the middle and the end of the year.
Step 4: pick a format
- A carousel post. Slide one: your map and the numbers. Then one slide per trip, in order. Last slide: "Next year:" and one place.
- A Story sequence. The same, one frame each, with the month as a big title.
- A short video. One or two shots per trip, cut to one song, title cards for each place. How to make a travel video on iPhone covers the tools.
- A printed page. Map at the top, numbers in a row, small photos below. Pinned to the fridge, it gets seen more than any post.
For the map, color your year's countries in the visited-countries map tool, and see how to share your travel map on Instagram for sizes that don't get cropped.
An example recap
Here's the shape of a recap for an ordinary year with five trips:
2026 in travel
- 5 trips, 5 countries, 2 of them new
- 14 cities, 38 days away, 8 flights
- March: Lisbon and Porto, the first trip with the baby
- May: Kyoto and Osaka, a first time in Asia
- August: a road trip around Iceland
- October: Rome for a wedding, with a day in Florence
- December: Christmas markets in Vienna, and a first night train
Short lines, one fact each, in order. The numbers set it up, the months tell the story. You can tick some of it off the bucket list too: a night train, a first time far from home.
Make the numbers honest
Readers check. If you count a two-hour layover in Doha as a country, someone will ask. Pick your rules once, write them under the numbers if they're unusual ("countries counted by the 193 UN members"), and use the same rules every year. How to count the countries you've visited helps you settle them.
Globestamp makes Wrapped, a year-in-travel story, from your year, and it's free.