Goshuin photos piled up on your phone: how to organise them into a record afterwards

This article covers one job only: turning photos of goshuin you already have into a record, afterwards. It does not cover planning a visit, or what any particular shrine or temple offers.

Where do you start with a phone full of goshuin photos?

Work in this order: gather the photos, settle the visit dates, place them into books and pages. Settling the dates before you sort anything is the point. Correct a date after the photos are in order and the order collapses again, and you do the same work twice.

The three stages are the same whatever tool you use. An album in your photo app, a spreadsheet, an app made for keeping records — the stages you pass through do not change. What changes is only how much of each stage is hand work.

Why is catching up afterwards harder than it sounds?

Doing it all in one go, you get stuck in four places: the books, the dates, the number of entries, and moving the record later. None of them is a matter of having been careless about record-keeping; they are built into the act of catching up.

Wall 1: you are on your second or third book

Keep receiving goshuin and the books multiply. You find a cover you like at a shrine or temple; you add one on a trip.

Photos, though, line up in a single row in the order you took them. The end of the first book and the start of the second fall in the same stretch of time, and looking back you cannot tell which book a given goshuin was in. The paper books have a boundary at each volume, and the photos have none — that is the first place you get stuck.

Wall 2: the goshuin is dated in a Japanese era, your phone in the Western calendar

The visit date written on a goshuin is almost always in a Japanese era. Your phone's calendar, and the capture date on every photo, are in the Western calendar.

Register fifty entries and you do that conversion fifty times. And once a record spans Reiwa and Heisei, you can convert one of them wrongly, sort on it, and only notice much later that the order is off. Where Reiwa, Heisei and Showa meet, and why the order breaks across a change of era is set out as a table in a separate article.

Wall 3: one entry at a time stalls partway

Ten entries you can do one at a time. A hundred you cannot.

Pick a photo, enter the date, type the name, save — repeating those four steps a hundred times is heavy before you begin, and in practice it stalls somewhere around the twentieth. For anyone starting from a backlog, one-at-a-time is itself the wall. Where to pick a record back up once it has stalled is written out step by step.

Wall 4: you are afraid of losing what you typed in

The more time a record takes to build, the more frightening losing it becomes. And it happens: accounts of a record not surviving a change of phone have been written about several apps, without a break, from 2019 through to 2026.

That fear belongs to the stage before you start — to choosing the tool. Four things to check before you choose an app to keep records in, where the records are stored and what they export to included, is a separate article.

What order do the three stages actually go in?

Gather without judging anything, settle each visit date against the date written on the goshuin, and leave books and pages until last. With your hands on the phone, the three stages look like this.

Stage 1: gather the photos. Put every photo of a goshuin in one place. Dates and order do not matter yet; one new album in your photo app that you drop them all into is enough. Not judging anything here is what matters — start weighing up whether each photo deserves a record and you stop moving.

Stage 2: settle the visit date. Go through the gathered photos one at a time and decide the visit date. The starting point is the day the photo was taken. A photo carries the date and time it was taken (this is the EXIF — the information the camera writes into the photo itself, such as when it was taken and on what device), and most of the time that is the visit date.

But the capture date and the visit date do not always agree: you photographed the page after you got home, you photographed a stack of loose sheets days later, the goshuin arrived by post. The visit date is usually written on the goshuin itself, so check it against the photo. When a goshuin carries no date, or the date cannot be read, narrowing the visit date down from the capture date and the photos either side is a separate article.

Some books never carry a date on paper at all. A nokyocho (納経帳), the book used on temple pilgrimage routes, is often written without a date, and once a second round stacks another seal on the same page, the paper can no longer tell you which seal belongs to which visit (how this is handled differs between routes and individual temples). Here too the clue is the capture date, and working out from photos which round happened when is written for that book in particular.

Stage 3: place them into books and pages. Once the visit dates are settled, decide which book and which page of it each one belongs to, and put them in that order. Only at this point does a heap of photos become a ledger in the order you visited. Why a record is kept per book, so more books never leave you guessing which one a goshuin was in is written up as well.

Which method do you record in?

Pick between four kinds — an album in your photo app, a spreadsheet, an app with a built-in list of shrines and temples, and a ledger with books and pages — on how many photos have piled up and how many paper books you own. Thinking in kinds rather than product names makes it easier to see what you are protecting.

None of them is the right answer. If you are already recording each visit on the spot, the first two are plenty. If the photos have piled up and you own more than one book, a form that looks after the third stage as well is the one that saves you work.

If you build your own spreadsheet, the three places it trips are matching photos to rows, sorting Japanese-era dates, and getting back to book-and-page order after you have sorted. Reading how to decide the columns, and how to avoid those three before you start saves rebuilding the sheet. Whatever the method, where the finished list lives and how you look back through it is covered in a separate article, written from the situations in which you look back.

That last kind is also the shape of the app I am building, Goshuin Ledger.

One thing worth checking once, while you are choosing: can you get the record out again if you stop using it? Put several hundred entries into a tool with no way to export and you can never move to another method. What comes out matters too — a backup for restoring onto another device is a different thing from a file a spreadsheet or a sheet of paper can read — so check what a backup, a CSV and a PDF each let you do at the same time.

Three things to decide before you start

Settle what counts as one entry, how you treat loose sheets, and how much you write, before you begin. Change your mind halfway and you have to go back and correct everything entered so far.

1. What counts as one entry. A goshuin written across a spread, or several received at one shrine or temple on the same day — how many do they count as? The counting is in the next section.
2. How you treat kakioki sheets. Whether the sheets pasted into a book and the ones you keep loose go into the same ledger. Manage them apart and you end up unable to find either. How to settle where and when a stack of loose sheets came from and put it in order is a separate article. If a sheet's date is still blank, decide as well whether you write the date onto the paper or keep it only in the record; the case for writing it in and the case for leaving it is written separately too.
3. How much you write. The name and the visit date only, or notes as well. Begin without deciding and the amount of information varies from record to record, which makes them hard to compare later.

What counts as one entry? Spreads, and several from one place

A spread is one entry that uses two pages; several goshuin from the same shrine or temple are one entry each; a return visit to the same place is one entry per visit. You will meet all three the moment you start, so decide first.

A goshuin written across a spread — one written over two facing pages. It is a single photo, but it takes up two pages of the book. When you number pages, counting it as one page or as two shifts every number after it. Treating it as two pages and one record is the counting that maps most easily onto the paper book. This app, though, counts a spread as one page, so when you want the numbers to match the paper, note which page of the paper book it sits on. How page numbers drift from the paper in a book that holds spreads is in the article about keeping a record per book.

Several from one shrine or temple — the goshuin of the principal image, one for a pilgrimage route, one for a season. Three on the same day in the same place does happen. Roll them into one entry and you can no longer ask later which day that seasonal one was from. One entry per goshuin leaves you more room afterwards.

Several visits to the same shrine or temple — plenty of people go to the same place every New Year. Here too it is one entry per visit. Group them under the name and several years collapse into a single entry. Keep the visits apart but searchable by name and by reading, and before a return visit you can check which goshuin you received last time and decide calmly, on the spot, what to do. How to check on the spot whether you were given one before, and how to tell apart shrines and temples that share a name is covered in detail in a separate article.

The idea behind all three is the same: split finely, and view them together later. The other direction — splitting records you already rolled together — is hand work.

How long does it actually take?

For about thirty photos, allow thirty minutes to an hour once you have the hang of it, and the visit dates eat most of it. It is hard to start without a sense of the size, so here is the breakdown.

Five minutes to gather the photos, twenty to forty to check the visit dates, about ten to put them into books and pages. Only the dates have no shortcut: you look at the goshuin one at a time.

That is for goshuin that carry a date you can read. Mix in ones whose date is illegible and a single photo can take several minutes. Set those aside and clear the readable ones first. Coming back to them once everything else is in order finishes faster, because by then what came before and after is a clue.

Above a hundred photos, you will get further by not trying to finish in one sitting. How to break it up is in the next section.

A way of working that survives being interrupted

Make one goshuin book the unit of work, finish all three stages for that book before you move to the next, and you can stop anywhere and pick it up again. Clearing a backlog rarely finishes in one go.

What to avoid is advancing one stage a little at a time across every photo you have. Enter visit dates for all of them, then all the names, and so on — stop halfway through that and what you are left with is not knowing how far you got.

With a book as the unit, you stop in a state where one of three books is done and two are untouched. You can see at a glance where to restart, and the finished book is already something you can look back through. That book maps one-to-one onto the paper one, so checking it against the real thing is easy too.

How this works in the app I am building

This app is the kind with books and pages from the table above, and the operations run in the same order: import the photos together, correct the visit dates, add them to a book and its pages. Pick several photos from your photo library and they line up in Imported photos, each with its capture date as the starting visit date; you correct that date photo by photo, or a whole range at once, and then add them to a book. What happens between picking the photos and seeing the records line up is written out in order in a separate article.

Of the stages in this article, two need a purchase: making a second book and beyond, and adding two or more imported photos to a book at once. Both come with the one-time Ledger Full. The first book records as many entries as you like without a purchase, and imported photos can be added to a book one at a time without a purchase. The App Store shows the current price. What the purchase covers is set out in the pricing section.

There are things it does not do. Page numbers are assigned in sequence from the end of the book, so when the order comes out differently from the paper book you reorder the rows by moving them up or down. It does not sync between devices.

You do not have to fill everything in perfectly

Get the visit date and the name of the shrine or temple onto every entry, and notes or impressions can wait until you feel like writing them. Trying to fill every field from the first entry is what stalls you around the tenth, so look first at choosing the fields you start with by whether you can add them later and at what those two fields alone let you look back on; the rest you add when you need it.

Many people receive a goshuin as proof of a visit. Organising the photos is work you do so the memory of the day can be traced back later, not a contest over how many you have collected. So that photographing and recording never come before the visit itself, how far to go when you photograph a goshuin is written up separately.