How to add a custom activity to Buddypress?

Question

In BuddyPress, I want to add a custom activity type called travel photos.

E.g so when you go to your profile, there's another link saying Travel photos. When you click it, it lets you post a new travel photo, with custom fields like location, date, and file upload.

I can figure out most things by viewing source code, but my question is,

1) Do I need to create another database table for storing these travel photos or is there a way to use the existing activity table for this, e.g by adding meta fields for location, date, filename, etc?

2) What's going to be the code/class that I'll need to use for inserting the activity into the database? E.g is there an Acitivy->saveMetaField() function or similar?

3) How can I have the user's feed say 'I added an new travel photo' after he adds one?

Answer 1

I've found that the only way to do it was to create my own buddypress component. The 'skeleton buddypress component' was very helpful in this.