Minube Lets You Automatically Create Beautiful Photo Albums Of Your Trip Based On Date And Destination

Minube, the ‘social travel app’ that offers inspiration, and trip-planning and sharing features for travellers, has undergone a clever revamp — one that repositions the app to put photo-album creation at its heart.

Specifically, its newly updated apps for iOS and Android let you quickly organise any travel photos you have stored on your phone, by automatically creating a beautiful digital photo album, based on trip, date and venue or destination.

It does this by making use of the location metadata that’s usually embedded in photos taken on a smartphone, and mapping these to Minube’s 2 million-strong database of attractions, restaurants, and hotels. The end result is essentially a way to share your itinerary visually once you’ve returned from your trip (see example).

It’s also a clever way to make Minube a more immediate consumer proposition by tying into our innate desire to share photos and in a way that also draws users into the Spanish startup’s core proposition: To act as a jumping-off point for would-be travellers who want to get inspired and plan their trips, while also helping to actually book them, which is one of the ways the company generates revenue.

To that end, the new photo album feature enables you to add travel tips to each photo, as well as share the resulting photo album with the Minube community and on social networks. The latter, of course, provides another avenue to help others discover the Minube app.

Despite representing a near-complete rewrite on iOS and Android, most if not all of Minube’s existing features remain intact. These include restaurant, tourist attraction and hotel recommendations in more than 50,000 cities worldwide; the option to save your favorite places as a list that can be downloaded to use as personalized offline travel guide; the ability to book hotel rooms directly from the app; and suggestions for your next trip based on distance, time, and type of trip.

“Basically, the travel-planning aspects of the app are the same before, but we’ve added a way to let travelers share an entire trip in one sitting rather than place by place. Our goal is for this feature to become a central part of our app,” Minube’s Chris Pearrow tells me.