Snapbook

Inspiration

In line with the worlds collide theme, we wanted to create an experience that enables the world of enthusiastic travellers to collide with other cultures.

What it does

Snapbook is an interactive travel scrapbook that brings your adventures to life. Just snap a photo of the scenery wherever you are - Snapbook instantly identifies your location, shades that country on your personal world map, and saves the moment in your digital scrapbook. Over time, you’ll build a vivid, photo-filled globe that tells the story of everywhere you’ve been.

You can also add friends, explore their globes, and see the world through their journeys, from mountaintops to city streets. Snapbook turns travel memories into a living, shareable map of your experiences.

Explore. Capture. Remember. With Snapbook, your world becomes your scrapbook.

How we built it

We built Snapbook using React and React-Leaflet for the 2D map view, and react-globe.gl with Three.js for the interactive 3D globe. User authentication and data storage are handled via Firebase Authentication and Firestore. Images are stored using Firebase Storage, and Picarta API to help identify the country where each photo was taken. The frontend dynamically shades visited countries and displays permanent tooltips and photo thumbnails.

What we learned

How to design scalable Firestore data structures for user-based collections. Practical teamwork and version control in managing multiple app components simultaneously.