2024 Year in Review and Looking Towards 2025

Happy new year!

It’s 2 weeks into 2025 and I’ve finally completed my year in review post for 2024.

2024 was a huge year of travel for us.

Mostly they were road trips across Canada and the USA.

I’ve easily added 2 terabytes of travel photos to my backlog in Adobe Lightroom.

By January or February 2024, we finally felt settled into a routine and rhythm for life in the USA. That gave us the time and energy to focus more time towards organising more ambitious trips and travel planning compared to the previous year.

It was not all smooth sailing in though…

It was an eventful year. A stolen purse, personal health challenges, cancelled flights and plenty of flight delays. I felt like I’ve learned to be more resilient to last minute changes, dealing with grief and making the most of bad situations.

Despite that, there was a lot to be grateful for in 2024.

As always, the year in review blog posts are focused on my reflections on running this blog, travel and photography. Followed by a sneak peak into my upcoming plans for the new year.

Lets dive in!

Previous Year in Review Posts

For the last 14 years, writing a review of the year that’s been and making plans for the upcoming year is a must-do December ritual.

It’s my way of reflecting on everything that’s happened—the good, bad and ugly.

It’s the time to celebrate the wins, reflect on what went wrong, what to double-down on, charge or start in the upcoming year.

If you haven’t done a annual reflection before, I highly recommend it!

Writing these Year in Review blog posts have become a tradition of mine, regardless of how active I’ve been blogging during the year. It’s the one post I always write.

If you’re curious, here’s a list of my previous year in reviews posts:

• 2016
• 2017
• 2018
• 2019
• 2020
• 2021
• 2022
• 2023

Now, make a cup of hot tea and lets dive in!

2024 Year in Review

Travelling Lens Blog

Did I hit my publishing target?

I set myself a goal of publishing 30 blog posts in 2024.

The result?

19 posts in 2024.

That works out to be 1 post every ~3 weeks. While I missed the goal by ~33%, that’s more posts than each of the last 3 years.

I wrote a total of 24585 words this year (each post had an average word count of 1294 words).

More words does not mean better content. This shift from mainly photo sharing to a combination of photography and writing has been a lot more time consuming to create, but I think it’s made the blog posts more helpful and valuable to readers.

(p.s. let me know in the comments before if you think so—Curious to hear!)

So while I didn’t take home the grand prize of hitting 30 blog posts in 2024, I think I’ve taken the second place prize of getting 66% the way there but with more in-depth helpful posts.

Blog traffic, AI and shifting internet landscape

The blogging landscape has been turned on it’s head with AI.

Despite publishing more posts than each of the previous 3 years, Travelling Lens website traffic was down by 34% compared to 2023!

From my research into the thought leaders in the blogging and SEO space, my understanding is that the drop in traffic is because of the rise of AI in search results, Google’s drastic changes to SEO algorithms and search engines no longer prioritising blogs and quality content.

A huge number of websites and prominent travel and photo blogs have all complained about the drop in traffic, buy as much as 50% to 90%!

So my 34% drop in traffic in 2024 (compared to 2023) is within the realm of normal.

But in saying that, my WordPress analytics tells me 70% of Travelling Lens traffic still comes from search engines like Google.

The next highest source of traffic is from Facebook, at a measly 0.05%!

That tells me helpful high quality and human-written content is still really important if you want to reach the right people with your posts.

But the golden age of SEO and high quality blog content being the main driver for traffic has long gone.

More than ever, bloggers who use blogging as a source of income directly or indirectly have to innovate and diversify if they want to keep reaching the right people and make an income on the internet.

While this Travelling Lens blog is a passion project and isn’t monetised in any way, I think there’s still value in finding ways to diversify the traffic sources to be helpful to the right people. So I’ll be talking more about what I plan to do in 2025 further down below.

The top 5 blog posts that in 2024

Based on my blog analytics, these were the most visited blog posts in 2024:

1. My initial impression and review of Wandrd Roam Sling camera bag
2. Flight Diary: Qantas Airbus A330 Business Class (Sydney to Perth)
3. Wandrd PRVKE Lite Camera Backpack: An Honest Review After 3 Years of Use
4. Review of Blurb Book Layflat Photobook
5. Review of Melbourne Qantas Domestic Business Lounge

A few of them were not actually written in 2024, but still generates a significant amount of traffic to the blog.

These top 5 posts tell me that photography and travel related reviews and recommendations from personal experiences are still valuable to readers.

I always enjoy writing those types of posts, so I’m glad to see that they still resonate with readers even years later (and it’s something I’ll try to focus more in moving into 2025).

What posts didn’t really gain a lot of traction?

Unsurprisingly, photo stories and very localised Houston-specific posts didn’t perform as well.

I didn’t write many of these types of posts, but I enjoy writing them because it’s a visual and written documentation of our time away from home as expat. If my readers expand more into expats living in the US, then I imagine these will be helpful blog posts.

But until then, it’s not something that the majority of my readers come to my blog for.

Audience and readership

My readers are mainly based in Australia (33%) and the United States (22%).

Historically, USA didn’t make up as big a chunk of my readership as it has in 2024. I presume that’s from sharing more content about USA compared to before.

The remaining 45% of readers come from across the world—mostly a mix of Canada, Europe and South East Asia.

Travel

2024 was a huge travel year.

By December 31, I travelled and been on the road for 116 days this year! That’s around 32% of the time that I was living out of a suitcase. It really did feel like it (and our bank account also shows it 😆).

Doing more travel was one of the reasons we decided to take up the uncommon opportunity to move to the US as expats for a couple of years.

To make travel a priority, we intentionally planned our year to maximise annual leave time and public holidays as much as possible. Trying to juggle all that travel with work and other life commitments was tough but we made it work.

2024 made me realise how much effort and logistics actually go into planning trips when you’re travelling for a third of the year!

It has reaffirmed that I have no interest in being a digital nomad—I’m much happier having a home base and using it as a travel hub to return to.

Our goal was to take at one trip each month to visit a new city or destination.

We well and truly hit that goal in 2024. Some months we even took 2 trips, and or took trips where we visited a few different cities.

Here’s a brief rundown of the places we visited.

The photos shared are straight out of camera JPEGs taken with the Fujifilm X-T4 and 99% of them were with the Fujinon 18-55mm f2.8-4 lens (the perfect traveller’s companion in my book).

Canada

A must-do for any visit to Canada is driving through the Canadian Rockies.

The landscapes are absolutely stunning. Huge mountains, unique wildlife and scenic hikes everywhere.

If you fly into Calgary, you can kick off your Canadian Rockie’s road trip from the town of Banff, which is just 1.5 hours away.

Here’s a list of the National Parks in the area are are easily accessible in the area (which we visited in our 11 days in Canada).

• Banff National Park
• Jasper National Park
• Kootenay National Park
• Yoho National Park

United States

In 2024, I was intentional with planning our trips around the seasons and weather that were good for visiting national parks and state parks.

The USA is a huge country with vastly different landscapes depending on National Parks System is one of the best things about the USA. From stunning mountain vistas to vast dessert landscapes that are millions of years old.

These parks aren’t always the easiest to get to, so if we weren’t living in the US, I’m not sure if we would have focused that much time on visiting these gems.

As a result of this planning, we’ve visited 3 state parks and 10 national parks in the USA.

We also hit a few major cities and culturally interesting towns along the way.

Here’s a quick recap on key places we visited in 2024 (more on each in future blog posts):

• Chicago, Illinois
• Memphis, Tennessee
• Salem, Massachusetts
• Dallas Fort-Worth, Texas
• New York City, New York
• Acadia National Park, Maine
• Yosemite National Park, California
• Napa Valley and San Francisco, California
• Las Vegas (twice!) and Valley of Fire, Nevada
• Jackson Hole and Grand Tetons National Park, Wyoming
• Revisiting Austin, Fredericksburg and San Antonio with family
• Small towns Texas (e.g. Brenham, Roundtop, Galveston, Kemah)
• Antelope Canyon, Grand Canyon National Park, Horseshoe Bend in Arizona
• Utah National Parks (Bryce Canyon, Zion, Canyonlands, Arches, Capitol Reef
• Seattle, Mount Rainer National Park and North Cascade National Park, Washington

Other parts of the world

We had a few opportunities to travel with family this year and got to check out some of these cities and countries:

• Malaysia
• Vietnam
• Singapore
• London, United Kingdom
• Paris and Bordeaux, France
• San Sebastian and Bilbao, Spain

Photography

With so much travel in 2024, I’ve built up an alarming backlog of photos.

Specifically I’ve added 27,352 photos to my burgeoning Adobe Lightroom catalogue.

I’ve been trying to cull, process and edit my photos along the way. But I hardly made a dent on it. If I’m honest, this rapidly growing backlog of photos is causing me a bit of anxiety.

So much so that I’ve found myself not taking photos to avoid adding more photos to the backlog.

Plans for 2025

Travelling Lens Blog

There are 3 main goals for this blog this year.

1. Website refresh

Since the birth of this blog, I’ve use this same WordPress theme.

But it’s time for a change. 8 years later, there are much faster, better and more modern WordPress themes out there. The one barrier to change has been the time and effort it would take to do the swap, as well as the risk of losing 8 years worth of data.

I don’t have an ETA for this big project, but I don’t think I can delay it any longer.

2. Aim to publish 24 blog posts in 2024

To be honest, this is a bit of an arbitrary goal.

Like previous years, it’s just something for me to work towards. I think there’s still a lot of value in human-experience, quality and long form writing. And writing is something I genuinely enjoy doing.

At the very least, this blog will still serve as a way to document and share our photo and travel experiences from our time away from home.

3. Start an email newsletter (Travelling Lens Insider)

I’m most excited about this!

Starting the Travelling Lens Insider newsletter is something I’ve thought about for the last 12 months. I’ll be diving deeper into why I think newsletters is the next evolution of blogging and a great way for photographers to connect in a future blog post.

The reality is SEO and writing good content is no longer enough.

Bloggers and photographers have to strategically use social media and other distribution platforms to grow their readership if they’re serious.

And then use email to connect with readers.

I’m setting myself a target of sending out 2 (maybe 3) issues of Travelling Lens Insider newsletter each month.

The focus of the newsletter is on sharing things I’ve learned in the last 18 months living as an expat in the USA, travelling and taking travel photos.

The aim is to offer travel inspiration, help readers maximise their time off to create memorable travel experiences (without breaking the bank or spending hours researching) and take home some great photo memories of your time away from home.

Even if you’re not a US-expat (or planning to become an expat), I think you’ll still gain a ton of value from getting the free newsletter.

Examples of the types of content I’ll be sharing:

• Travel hacks and tips.
• Trip recaps and destination guides.
• Curated photography tips, how-to’s and resources to take better travel photos.
• Reviews on all things travel from personal experience—flights, hotels, lounges, activities etc.

Photography

No major changes here from previous years.

I’m still enjoying using the Fujifilm X-T4 camera and the various Fujinon lenses. If anything, since we started doing a lot more travel, I’ve appreciated the compact size of the Fujifilm x-series cameras. The Fujinon 18-55mm f2.8-4 lens in particular is truly my workhorse travel lens.

It the lens that’s on my camera 99% of the time because it’s so versatile.

We intend to make the most of the next 6 months to travel, so I’ll likely keep adding to my backlog of photos.

I won’t even pretend like I’ll get through this backlog before we return to Australia!

Instead, I’ll focus my editing time on the photos I plan to share on this blog and the newsletter.

Travel

Nothing’s been booked in for 2025 at the moment.

But we’ve made a shortlist of places we’re excited to visit in 2025, but the list is definitely longer than we have time for.

A few travel ideas at the moment:

• A Caribbean Cruise. Many expats have raved about the Disney Cruises. And the Caribbeans is not somewhere we would have prioritised if we were flying all the way from Australia. So this is quite high on the list
• Mexico historical or beach-side holiday. We’ve been to Cancun, Mexico with friends back in 2023 and had a ball. We wouldn’t mind heading back there for a long weekend trip to relax, or to do something more cultural like Mexico City or Tulum.
• Kentucky and the Bourbon trail. This is something uniquely American. I’m not a whiskey drinker, but it would be a fun road trip to check out Nashville, Louisville and Mammoth Caves National Park in Kentucky, especially with friends.
• Los Angeles and Disneyland. I grew up with Disney and am a big Disney fan. I’ve visited Disney World in Orlando, but never visited the OG Disneyland in California. I don’t think I could leave the US without visiting LA either.
• A ski trip to a ski town. We’re not winter sports people, but that would be a fun thing to do while in the US since the US has some of the best (and also unfortunately very expensive) ski towns in the world.
• More National Parks. We’ve hit probably the top 10 most popular national parks in the US, but I wouldn’t mind adding a few more to the tally if we can manage it. High on the list is Rocky Mountains in Colorado, and Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in California.

Making Travel Planning Easier (Free Notion Template)

A goal without a plan is a dream.

So the first step to start travelling and exploring more is to get organised and intentional about making a plan and locking in travel dates ahead of time so the trips actually happens.

But I get it. There’s a lot to juggling when it comes to travel planning—itinerary, accommodation, flight options, things to do, recommended food and drink places etc.

I wouldn’t recommend keeping track of all that in your head. I’m a big Notion fan and I use that to plan and track all our trips. I also use it for other things like meal planning, tracking my tasks and projects, and keeping track of my camera gear etc.

Notion is free to use, hyper customisable and saves you time by giving you the ability to templatise things you do often.

So you’re not reinventing the wheel each time you want to plan a new trip in Notion.

If you want to make travel planning easier, start with downloading my free Travel Hub Template System in Notion that’s been downloaded more than 824+ times below:

Wrap up

2024 has been a huge year of travel for us.

I’m so grateful for the time we have spent exploring more of north America while we’re here. A few of these trips were also with friends and family, which has been fun and gotten us outside of our comfort zones.

Between work, travel and other life commitments, writing more blog posts for Travelling Lens hasn’t been a high priority.

2025 is shaping up to be an exciting year for photography and travel—and I can’t wait to share it all with you, whether on the blog or in the newsletter.

Until next time, happy travelling!

Janice.

The Travelling Lens Insider is your twice monthly dose of travel hacks, trip recaps, curated travel and photography resources to level up your travel and expat-life in the US right in your inbox. Don’t miss out on getting the insider scoop, get it below!