Is there an app that logs all the goshuin photos you piled up at once?

This article covers only the tool for logging a backlog of goshuin photos afterwards, and the order you do it in. It does not compare recording apps against one another, and it does not go into how to think about organising photos in the first place. That thinking is in how to organise and record the goshuin photos piled up on your phone.

Is there an app that logs the photos you took, all at once?

There is. The app I develop, Goshuin Ledger, starts from picking several photos together, lines them up with each capture date standing in as the visit date, and carries them through to a book and its pages as one flow. Try to clear a backlog with a tool built on the assumption of one entry per visit, and you repeat the same operation once per goshuin.

Why the backlog forms is not a mystery. Right after a visit, still inside the feeling of having watched the goshuin written, nobody wants to be typing records. You take a photo and plan to enter it later. Then you open the app a few months on, and: the date on the goshuin is in a Japanese era, the field in the app wants the Western calendar, the photos are in the order you shot them, and the goshuin book you are filling is your second.

The four ways the "afterwards" side jams are set out in that article on organising. This one only describes how a tool built for those four jams behaves.

What are the steps, from picking photos to records in order?

Four operations: pick the photos together, read the capture date, fix the visit date, add them to a book and its pages.

1. Pick the photos together. From the iOS photo picker, select several photos of goshuin at once. A single pass takes up to 100, so 20 or 50 go in together.
2. Read the capture date. A photo carries the date and time it was taken (this is EXIF — the information a camera writes into the photo itself, such as when it was taken and which model took it). Imported photos arrive with that capture date already filled in as the visit date. A photo whose capture date cannot be read gets the day you imported it instead.
3. Fix the visit date. Capture date and visit date do not always agree: you photographed the page after you got home, or photographed a loose sheet (a kakioki) days later. This is where you fix the visit date in its Japanese era. One photo at a time, or a whole selection moved to the same day at once.
4. Add them to a book and its pages. The corrected photos go into a book, meaning one volume of a goshuin book. Page numbers carry on from where that book left off — photos added together fall in visit date order — and rows move up or down afterwards.

Only once you are through that fourth step do you have a ledger in the order you visited. Stopping at the third leaves you with photos that carry visit dates, but until a particular page of a particular volume is settled, there is nothing to line up against the book in your hands.

Within that fourth step, adding two or more photos to a book at once is part of Ledger Full. Without the purchase you still add them to a book one at a time, keeping every visit date you corrected.

Do you need a database of shrines and temples to record anything?

You do not. You type the name of the shrine or temple yourself, so whether a place appears in somebody's list never decides whether you can record it. You tap the map to drop a pin only when you want to keep the location as well.

A small roadside shrine no list carries, or a subordinate shrine inside the grounds that no map names, records exactly the same way. Once a shrine or temple is saved, typing the name again suggests it; choose the suggestion and every goshuin from that place comes back together in a search.

Can you find "where was this one from?" afterwards?

You can. Search by the name of the shrine or temple, its reading, your note, the Japanese-era visit date, or the type, and the result tells you which book and which page the goshuin sits on. This is the real reason for keeping a record at all.

With only the paper book in your hands, you stop being able to say where a page came from. The name is brushed in a hand you cannot read; the place had several halls and you cannot tell which one wrote it; you went to four places in one day and cannot match them to pages. None of that is carelessness — it is ordinary.

If the record holds the name and the visit date, you can pull it from either. Search "Reiwa 3" and the goshuin received that year line up newest first. Enter the reading and you can find it without remembering the kanji. Hiragana and katakana, full-width and half-width, count as the same characters.

Search the name of a place you are about to visit again and you can check what you received last time before you ask at the office. Checking your record for last time's goshuin is a separate article.

What can you do without a purchase, and what does the one purchase add?

Without a purchase you record one goshuin book's worth, with no limit on the number of entries. Three things come with Ledger Full: a second book and beyond, adding imported photos to a book all at once, and PDF / CSV export. Ledger Full is an in-app purchase you pay for once (a one-time payment — there is no monthly charge).

If you already own two or more goshuin books, you need this purchase from the start. The App Store shows the current price. What the purchase covers is also set out in the pricing section of this site.

A PDF is one file per book, carrying the photo of each goshuin, the visit date and the name of the shrine or temple. A CSV is a table with one goshuin per row, which opens in a spreadsheet. Both are exports made for reading, which is a different job from the backup that moves your records to a new phone. What goes into the PDF, which columns the CSV has, and how to choose between the PDF, the CSV and the backup are in a separate article.

Which iPhone does it run on? Does it need a connection, or a sign-in?

It runs on iPhone with iOS 16.4 or later, and it needs no sign-in and no account registration. There is no iPad-specific layout.

Records, photos and settings are all saved on the device, and no record or photo is sent anywhere. A connection is needed in two places only: showing the map, and talking to the App Store for a purchase or to restore one.

What this app does not do

Four things: it does not read your current location, does not sync between devices, does not publish your records, and does not tally your progress around a pilgrimage circuit. Saying so first seems fairer, so here they are with the reasons.

• It does not read your current location. It never asks for location permission, and keeping the location at all is optional.
• It does not sync with other devices. There is no server behind it. For a phone change you either move with the standard iOS backup (iCloud Backup or Quick Start), or export an encrypted backup with a passphrase and import it on the new phone. Forget the passphrase and that backup cannot be restored. What to check before you change phones is a separate article.
• It has no way to publish a record. There is nowhere to look at other people's records, and nowhere to show yours to anyone.
• It does not count how far along a pilgrimage circuit you are. A book is a shelf, not a score.

This app is built around one thing only: logging goshuin in bulk, after the fact. If you already manage to record each one on the spot, the tool you use now is probably the better fit. I made this for the person whose photos have piled up and whose hands have stopped.