What to take out of a goshuin record before you show it to anyone

This article covers one thing only: what stays in the other person's hands when you show or hand over the record of the goshuin you have collected, and what to take out before you do. Whether to photograph a goshuin at all, and whether a photo can go on social media, are not settled here.

What do you take out before you show anyone?

Four things: the notes you wrote for yourself, anything that hints at where you live or work, the location stored in a photo, and the names of people who came with you. Every one of them is so ordinary to the person who built the record that it is the easiest thing to miss in the moment before showing it.

A record is normally built so that you can look back at it yourself. Once you keep your records as a list, you can sort by visit date or by the name of the shrine or temple and read back years at a time, and that same usefulness works just as well once the list is in someone else's hands. What helps you becomes, on their side, material for reading off roughly where you live and when, and with whom, you go out.

There is only one thing to settle before you choose how to show it: whether showing is enough, or whether the other person needs to keep something.

What stays with them depends on how you show it

Showing your own screen beside someone leaves nothing in their hands; a photo, a PDF, a printout or a spreadsheet stays in a form they can reread whenever they like and pass on to other people. Set out by method, it looks like this.

The further down the rows, the more the other person can generally do with it later. If nothing needs to stay with them, the top row is enough. Talking your grandparents through your goshuin book on a visit home is one of many occasions that needs no more than that. When they do want to look back at it later, it becomes paper or a PDF. For paper, which fields to print and which to leave off is set out in a separate article.

How does the person change what you take out?

The further the person is from you, the greater the chance the file travels on from them, so you take out more. The same PDF reaches a different range depending on whether it goes to the family you live with or to someone you met through the same hobby.

Read every note again before you hand it over

A note is written on the assumption that only you will read it, so before you hand over a PDF or a spreadsheet you read all of them again. A few seconds each is nothing; two hundred entries is a block of time.

The kind of note you will want to take out (all of these are invented):

• Health and medical appointments ("visited while waiting for the test results")
• What you prayed for, or family circumstances
• A line about your work or about someone you know
• A frank impression of the office, or of the person who wrote the goshuin

Be particularly careful with the last one. However much it was meant as a note to yourself, a file that travels can be read as a review of the shrine or temple that gave you the goshuin.

For a spreadsheet file, you can delete the note column in your spreadsheet program and hand over a copy saved under a different name. If the way your PDF or your printout is made gives you no way to take out the notes alone, switch to showing your screen, or to handing over a spreadsheet with the note column deleted.

Where you live and work shows in the pattern of the records

Even with no address written anywhere, the number of visits to the same shrine or temple, and the clustering of dates and weekdays, point at the area you live in and the route you commute.

Thirty-six entries for a shrine near home, on the first of every month across three years, make it more or less certain that you live nearby. A run of visits to the same temple by a station, always on weekdays, sketches a commute. A note reading "on the way home from work" settles it.

In the same way, the run of dates across visits away from home reads as when your house was empty. If there is any chance of the file going beyond your family, reduce it: take out the records of shrines and temples near home, or narrow what you show to the few days of the trip.

The place a photo was taken cannot be seen in what the photo shows

A photo taken on a smartphone records the date and time and, depending on your settings, the location where it was taken. No amount of looking at what is in the frame tells you the location, so checking the frame is not a way of taking it out. Whether it is attached can be checked by opening the photo's detailed information in your photo app.

The easy one to miss is a goshuin photographed at home. Taking your time over it at the desk once you are back is a natural thing to do, but if that photo carries a location, what it points at is your home rather than a shrine or temple.

When you send a photo from the photo app, check in iOS's share options whether the location is included. Some ways of sending keep it and some do not, so when you are not sure which, taking it out at your end is the reliable choice.

Whether to photograph a goshuin, and whether the photo can go on social media, are handled differently by each shrine and temple. What holds everywhere about photographing and posting, and what each shrine or temple decides for itself is sorted out in a separate article. This one covers only the handling after you have decided to show it.

A companion's name is their information too

Do not pass the name of someone who visited with you to a third party without asking them. Even inside a record of your own, where you were on which day and who was with you is a record of their movements as well.

A note saying "with my mother", or one that names a friend, is part of the memory while the showing stays inside the family. When you hand a file to an acquaintance, delete the name or reword it as "with a friend". The same goes for a companion's hand or figure caught in a photo.

A file you have handed over cannot be taken back

Once you have sent a file, copies stay on the other person's device, in their backups, and anywhere it has been forwarded on, and you cannot delete them from your end. A messaging app that can unsend a message does not remove a file the other person saved first.

So the taking out happens before you hand anything over. Going in this order leaves less to miss.

1. Decide the range you are showing. One book, a period, or a single entry.
2. Ask whether anything needs to stay with them. If not, show your screen and stop there.
3. Read the notes again. Take out health, family, work, and impressions of a shrine or temple.
4. Look again at the pattern of the records. Take out runs of shrines and temples near home, and any run that shows when your house was empty.
5. Check the location on your photos. Especially the ones taken at home.
6. Take out companions' names, and anyone caught in a photo.

In the app I make

When it comes to showing or handing over records, the PDF and the CSV from Goshuin Ledger, the app I make, have no column or field for location. The notes do go in, though, so read them again before you hand anything over.

• PDF is one file per book. Photos, visit dates and the names of shrines and temples go in, and so do the notes; where you placed a pin on the map does not. There is no setting that leaves out the notes alone when you export.
• CSV is one goshuin per row, with the name of the shrine or temple, the visit date (in its Japanese era and in the Western calendar), the book and page, the note and more. There is no location column, and the photos themselves are not included. When you would rather not hand over the notes, you can delete the note column in a spreadsheet program first.
• The backup (a .goshuin file encrypted with a passphrase) exists to move your records to your own new device when you change phones. It is not something to hand to another person. Handed over together with the passphrase, it amounts to handing over every record, notes, photos and map pins included.

Everything the PDF and the CSV hold, and how the backup differs from both, are compared side by side in what each of the three exportable files contains.

This app has no feature for publishing records, and none for holding the same records as somebody else, because it is built without accounts, with records saved inside the device. Showing means showing your screen, or choosing an exported file yourself and handing that over. Not needing an account and records never being sent anywhere are not the same thing, though: four things to check when you choose a no-account, on-device record app is written up separately.

PDF and CSV export come with the one-time Ledger Full, and your first book takes as many records as you like without a purchase. What the purchase covers is set out in the pricing section, and the App Store shows the current price.