About Waar is Frank?

One of my personal projects started as the digital equivalent of a travel photo album.

Long ago I travelled the world with a film camera. Back home a huge amount of slides, several hundreds, were put in a cabinet. A small selection was printed and put in an album. Next to the pictures was the place they were taken, perhaps a comment about the weather or extraordinary circumstances. The album was also put in the cabinet, and was seldom taken out again. If you wanted to show someone after a few years a particular picture, you'd have a hard time finding it.

Around 2000 to 2005 that changed dramatically. Digital cameras arrived. You could take a picture and send it immediately by e-mail to someone else on the other side of the world. If you did it once, people expected you did it next time as well. Later you could post it on a website. And GPS became affordable, so you could record where you'd been and use that to automatically associate a photo with the location it was taken. A digital picture was much cheaper than one on film, so you could easily take a thousand pictures over a holiday of a few weeks.

Since 2005 I've adopted the one-picture-one-story-per-day as an alternative to the traditional photo albums: Waar is Frank? was born. Commercial websites for these purposes had an average lifetime of a few years, so I created my own website for that. Made it public to share the stories with the people back home. The website survived the era of Twitter and Instagram, and in 2025 the third version of the website was launched. It is now very much a Federated Me project: its main purpose is to be my personal travel record, and everyone who is interested is invited to take a look.

The Waar is Frank? website for stories and maps, and Waar was Frank? for pictures are the only public components of the WaarIsFrank software. But there's more. The public Waar is Frank? website is generated from the same source files as another private website that is my personal travel photo album, with much more information and photos. All my images are on Flickr. I've got tools to upload/synchronise the website, Flickr, local backup disc and online backup archive. I've also got (private) tools to plan the itinerary, collect and manage interesting sights and routes, make them available to an app (with offline maps). And to monitor the weather forecasts. Some of the data ends up on the website, most of it is still private.