Recently I went on a trip to Budapest. For the first time I decided to track the trip with Polarsteps. While travelling I wrote steps and added photos to it.
When I got home, I got the offer to create a Travel Book, so I went ahead and compiled a book, go to checkout… Surprise! €107 with the discount already included. And I didn’t even add all the uploaded photos. 🤯
To be fair, this was not the price tag that I had in mind for a little Budapest souvenir.
For me personally, a much cheaper digital travel book in PDF format would have been perfectly fine. Unfortunately, Polarsteps doesn’t offer it.
So naturally, instead of simply accepting that I couldn’t have one, I did the completely reasonable thing and started building an application to create my own offline digital travel book. 😅
So, I present: icySteps
You manually recreate the moments you actually want to preserve, attach the photos you want, choose a theme, and icySteps turns it all into a proper digital travel book. The application can export a print-ready PDF, portable HTML and ZIP version, with images optimized automatically. Everything happens locally: the database and managed photos stay on your computer.
OK, it doesn’t have all the fancy features Polarsteps offers, like exact location, travel distances, maps, routes, etc. But to be honest, those things just aren’t that important to me.
And this accidentally solved another problem with a physical travel book: sharing it.
I can put the HTML version somewhere, send the ZIP to somebody, keep it on my NAS, or give someone the PDF. It’s my travel book, so I can do whatever I want with it.
What started as “chapters + photos → PDF” already has four pastel themes, cover generation, drag-and-drop chapter/photo ordering, live preview, image compression, portable HTML with a photo viewer, ZIP export, and even portable backups with cross-platform restore.
Development note: I built icySteps with OpenCode and GPT-5.6 Terra as my AI coding assistant.
So that’s icySteps: the souvenir I wanted from Budapest somehow turned into another software project.
I still don’t have the €107 Polarsteps Travel Book.
I think I got something better - something I can reuse again and again. 😎
