One of the most rewarding parts of family travel can also be the most frustrating: cataloging the memories. When travelling with your kids, you are especially sensitive to the preciousness of this time, and the fact that they will, at some point, grow up. Photos, videos and other remembrances are an essential part of family vacationing as they preserve the experience you’ve shared. On the other hand, if you spend the whole time looking through a camera and organizing photos, you miss out on actually being there with your family. How does one strike a balance?

Enter Findery, a new service created by Caterina Fake, of Flickr fame. This new website and app, allows you to create a “travel journal” in real time. It ties memories to places in an elegant interface that ensures the right balance between preserving the time away and actually enjoying your vacation.

What does Findery do?

Findery lets you attach notes in a variety of forms – text, photos, videos, audio – to specific locations while you are travelling. It could be your family posed in front of a stunning fountain, the funny joke the waiter told you at that wonderful cafe, or a video of your daughter trying on the too-big-for-her hats at a street market. By tying these unique memories, whatever they may be, to locations, you and your family can return home to find a real life map of your trip and help recall how you spent your days touring and experiencing an area with each other.

With the option to simply use GPS coordinates, there is no time spent searching and fumbling for places from a long list of similar sounding names (perhaps in a foreign language) and the notes you add can be as many or as few as you want. Findery is about empowering you to preserve whatever memories are important to your family, and providing a simple and attractive way to do it – on the go.

Findery is different from other services in that it isn’t about “checking in” at businesses, or rating restaurants on how many users reviewed it. Findery is all about stories and memories. The service allows you to see other people’s tags (you can choose to share or hide our own) but you won’t be seeing notes about who overcooks their eggs or how long the lines are at a gallery. Findery shares memories in whatever form is important to the user. You likely spend enough time on your phone at home, on vacation with the family, put away the distracting apps and simply allow yourself to make a few quick notes that help you reconstruct the experience over a family dinner when you get home.