And lately more and more casual users are turning to social platforms like Instagram to share their creativity (don’t say that to your photographer friend). But none of these services cater to the story teller in you. Today we will talk about two new services that do.
Why Create Photo Stories
The best use case for Photo stories is for travelogues. Because when you share a picture of your travels, it’s not just a picture, it’s a narrative. There’s always a little story, an anecdote behind it. And sometimes the caption tool on Facebook or Flickr does not do justice to your story. Of course, you can use these tools for just about anything that you think can use a bit of visual upgrade, be it showcasing your art or adding a bit of taste to your business proposal. But if you are a fan of sharing your travel stories with your friends and family, give one of these tools a try, especially Storehouse.
1. Storehouse
Storehouse is a free iPad only app that lets you create beautiful photo stories right from your iPad. The UI is based on gestures with a horizontal timeline layout. Swipe left-right to scroll through the stories, swipe down to read the story and pinch in with two fingers to go back. Writing stories is just as pleasurable as reading them in Storehouse. The set up is minimal yet flashy. The fonts are new age sans-serif as opposed to classic serif fonts found in newspapers and they look good in any screen. Writing a story is easy. Start with a Title and sub title, add some photos ( you can import them from Dropbox, Flickr, Instagram or your local storage) write some text and play around with the layout. Pictures are really easy to scale, shift and crop and using your fingers for doing it work surprisingly well. Pictures are inline elements (as opposed to text) so you are free to drag them anywhere you want and make interesting patters. You can convert your standard text to a header or a quote for more emphasis.
Exposure
Exposure is a Web only client for creating photo stories online. Its design language is an interesting mix of newspapers from last century and new age san-serif fonts. The headlines are sharp while the bylines have a bit of nostalgia to them. And weirdly enough, Exposure pulls it off. Being a web based app, Exposure is understandably slower to use than Storehouse. Also being a web app, it only allows you to import photos from your desktop and does not provide you with a direct link to a dedicated service. You also get limited options for photos. You can either add a set or a full width photo, but that is it.
The Winner: Storehouse
Storehouse is just an iPad app but it is powerful. Compared to Exposure, which is free for only first three stories, Storehouse lets you create unlimited stories for free and gives you a lot more options to import and customize media than Exposure. And Storehouse is responsive. So the stories you wrote on your iPad look just as pretty on a 4 inch iPhone as they do on a 23 inch monitor. Storehouse lets you share your photo stories with anyone you want through web. And in my testing I did not find any loss of quality for uploaded media, unlike Facebook. Storehouse will even let you import videos as long as they are shorter than 30 seconds.
Your Story
What is your preffered medium for sharing high quality photos with your friends? And is Storehouse something that interests you? Let us know in the comments below. The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.
