storytelling

The old photographer’s saying goes “the best camera for the shot is the one you have with you.” With more than half of the US now possessing a mobile phone with digital camera built in, the phone has become the camera fo choice for many. This is evidenced by the plethora of apps out there that allow you to take, modify, and share your photos in all sorts of ways.

Disney Interactive may be a little slow out of the gate, but they have announced their own photo based sharing app. It has an emphasis that’s core to the Disney experience – Story. In fact, that’s the apps name.

Story allows you to quickly assemble storybooks of your daily experiences. You choose a theme, add a few narrative bits of text, and select the photos or video you want to include, then Story makes it available to share and view via mobile or web device.

“When we become moms, our iPhone instantly becomes the go-to device to capture the spontaneous moments of family life. Before we know it, we have thousands of photos and videos on it,” said Brooke Chaffin, senior vice president, Disney Interactive Family. “With Story, we’ve created a easy-to-use app that takes this content and creates meaningful narratives and stories that can be shared with friends and family with just a few taps.”

You are allowed up to 20 photos and two short videos in each story. It reminds me a bit of the digital scrapbooking software that was popular a few years ago, but really stripped down to the essentials.

Story features:

• Effortless Storytelling: The Story App automatically finds the moments in the Photo Library on your iPhone or iPod touch, based on when and where your photos and videos were captured.
• Creative Freedom: Users can simply select a moment to share immediately, or personalize it with their own captions, pages of text, themes and layouts.
• Quick, Selective Sharing: With just a couple of taps, stories can be shared via e-mail or Facebook. They are visible in any browser to invited friends and family on Story.us. Stories can also be embedded on your website or blog.
• Preservation: All stories created are saved in the app and backed up by iCloud for future viewing and editing.

Alas Story by Disney is only available for iOS devices (iPhone or iPad) at the moment. I hope Disney Interactive realizes its ignoring more than 54% of the mobile phone market (myself included) by not having an Android version too.

I’ve embedded a sample Story to explore below the jump:

Read More »New Disney App Puts Storytelling In Your Hands