Footprints

Your Digital Diary for documenting the places you’ve been

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🌟 Inspiration

I love journaling but turning a real-life experience into a beautiful journal spread isn’t always easy. Saving receipts, ticket stubs, and memorabilia, gathering art supplies, and carving out the time to assemble everything can quickly become overwhelming.

Yet documenting the places we visit matters. A cozy café, a spontaneous dinner downtown, a weekend hotel stay, or a relaxing spa visit, these moments tell the story of our lives. I wanted a way to capture those experiences instantly, without losing the creativity and charm of an aesthetic journal.

Footprints was born from a simple question: What if journaling your adventures could be just as cute and meaningful without the mess, time commitment, or pressure?

💡 What It Does

Footprints is a digital diary that lets you beautifully document the places you’ve been: restaurants, bars, cafés, hotels, spas, and more.

Using the Yelp AI API, Footprints extracts rich, niche details about each business—such as menu highlights, ambiance, and unique characteristics and transforms them into custom-designed journal components. Some examples:

  • Stylized receipts based on actual menu items
  • Stickers and visuals that match the venue’s vibe
  • Photos and aesthetic elements tailored to the experience

Each visit becomes a personalized, scrapbook-style entry so no scissors, glue, or hours of effort required.

You can also share your Footprints journal with others, allowing friends to explore the places you’ve been to and discover new spots to try themselves. It’s part memory-keeping, part creative expression, and part social discovery.

🛠️ How We Built It

Core Technologies

  • TypeScript
  • React
  • Yelp AI API
  • HTML5
  • CSS3
  • Firebase
  • Vercel
  • Vite
  • Open AI

🛠️ How It Uses Yelp AI API Creatively

  • Yelp AI API generates a detailed summary of the place based on the backend prompt sent. We feed this info into an AI image generation tool to create custom components based on that - eg popular menu items.
  • Yelp AI API finds out vibes of restaurant in 3 words and it uses this as a journalling element you can drag and drop
  • Yelp AI API also finds out other things eg the receipt component has actual company info on the receipt
  • These are just some examples, we hope to use the API to add even more personalization
  • You can share these journal pages to others - it's a unique way to discover a new business

🚧 Challenges We Ran Into

  • Generating the right prompts for making the right journal components
  • Create Drag and Drop interface - many issues and bugs to get that to work

🏆 Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

  • Submitting this project - yay
  • Working with new technologies - used Type Script for the first time
  • Overcoming a lots of bugs

🔮 What's Next for Footprints

  • Implement sharing journal feature properly
  • Add more custom journalling components - maybe link with Pinterest to get more images

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