Show HN: myStorify.com - storify your photos | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: myStorify.com - storify your photos

mystorify.com

24 pointssupo35 comments

Are you sure it's a good idea to use this name, when an established company like Storify exists?

I like your project, but if this catches on, it's better to change the name sooner rather than later.

Agree. I thought this was some sort of add-on to Storify.

As a power storify user; this - neat idea, change the name ASAP!

Yeah, this is slightly unfortunate. We became kind of stuck wit the name searching - we want to show that we are not just another photo gallery and have the story or something that describes the nature of story extraction/visualization in there. And it is hard to find any domain in this space these days.

Any ideas? :p

Any ideas posted here will be taken by some asshole. I say that from experience. :)

Good point, would love to hear more!

I have my contact details in the profile here.

wouldlovetohearmore.com is available

This is not "storifying" because the output is not a story. It's metadata and visualization attached to an album.

I make the distinction because story is important. I'd suggest reading http://www.amazon.com/Wired-Story-Writers-Science-Sentence/d... if you haven't already.

A storified album will only be a story if the user curates the album that way. There is a kernel of story in the demo but there will not be in every album. Questions to ask about a story: Who are the characters? What do they want? How are they changing? What is the dramatic tension? If you can't answer these questions, I submit that it's not a story.

So, you can't automate storytelling (at least not now.) Encompassing photos in metadata about their context IS valuable. Context is important. So you're on to something.

But storytelling is very very powerful. I'm sure you have a laundry list of features to implement but I think you should consider if there are ways to refocus on making it easier for album owners to author real stories around their photos. These are the types of narrative that compel us and resonate with us biologically.

Put another way: Where, when, what and how help us understand but why pulls us in. If you can focus less on automation and more on empowerment to enable authors to weave in the why, then I think you will really be on to something. Your site will also not be about travel and instead be about life. Because we are all living a story every moment, not just when we get on a plane.

Thanks for the insight. You are right that our primary target right now is traveling, because it is the best place to start. It is the easiest use case for which we can automate the process (based on photo metadata).

According to our study about sharing memories between FRIENDS and archiving memories, it comes up that the important parts of the story are who attended the events, what happened a what were the most important events and other related stuff (where, weather etc).

We tried to visualize what happened and the importance of the events (if you take a lot of pictures in a short time it is sure that it there was something interesting) in the chart to create the visual aid not textual to better understand the story. Yes I agree it is not enough clear what the chart is, we have to make definitely some improvements here.

WHY and other story related stuff are a bit tricky for us. We have to consider the usability point of view, how much time the user wants to spend in the creation process. Is it 5, 10, 40min? Other point of view is the target audience. Is it me, the author, to recall the memories? Is it my friends to share the story? Is it a public "blog" for all the people I don't know? You friends already know a lot information so you can trade for simplicity. We tried to solve the WHY issue with the description field to the event, but you are right that it should lead the user to input the information in a way that he creates the "real" story.

Thanks for the book tip, I'll definitely read it.

Looks pretty great so far, and I really like the pages you're creating.

Just a handful of things:

1. I don't like logging in with my Google Account. I can see that you're using my Google pictures so you're going to need that. I don't like it anyway.

2. I completely don't understand the graph at the left hand side of your pages. Perhaps it's number of photos (but then that info appears twice, right?). Or is it text written? Or is it distance covered? Or is it coolness of the segment? Some information would be nice.

3. Or even better, how about customizing that area? I know you're quite early in development, but I'd expect to see some interaction there.

4. The location was a little off when I loaded my non-geotagged pictures. It placed them somewhere in Slovakia for some reason. After placing one of my segments into Africa, the overall location marker moved to Germany.

5. These little info boxes are cool. Can I do them myself, please?

6. The time line is interesting, but I'd like to customize that a bit better. In my case, there's lots of empty space at the top and the bottom because I arrived on Saturday and left on Tuesday, causing empty weeks there.

Ok, that was a bit of stuff. Don't take is as criticism, I really like the concept, but I'd also like to see it developed a bit more.

Wow terrific feedback, definitely appreciated!

1) Login with Google is just a way to make it simpler for us for an MVP (and as you note we need the photos as we don't have a direct photo upload in this product just yet).

2) The graph is a reflection of intensity of the story (basically the more photos you take, the more interesting stuff is going on around you) and it gives you a time context for how things went.

We will definitely add an explanation in the interface.

3) What kind of customization do you mean? Structural (move things around) or cosmetic (colors, etc). Basically the graph is firstly a navigation tool. You click on the event names to move to that moment in all the views of the app (album photo grid/large photo view/album edit mode).

4) The map widget starts centered in Slovakia (center of Europe) for non-geotagged photos. This does not mean that the location was assigned to the album, it is just how the widget renders. (Does it look like we automatically assign the position? Any idea on how the map widget could look to avoid this confusion?)

For geotagged we are of course working on using this information (it is no there yet).

5) It is all about the context (graph - time context, info boxes - POI in the area or related concepts).

6) The problem with empty space in the timeline is that once you start 'stretching' and 'compressing' it, the time axis will stop being homogeneous which sort of ruins the effect of 'at-a-glance' time awareness. If there was a big block of down-time on the holiday, why do you want to mask it by covering the gap in the graph? The representation loses faithfulness that way. But maybe a faithful representation is not that desired here, hmm :-D

2) I see, but that still means that the data is shown twice, doesn't it? Once in the little bar-graphy-thingy to the right and once in the name placement.

3) Both structural and cosmetic would be nice. I know that at the moment the graph is for navigation only, but why not make it another tool to tell an aspect of my story? Don't worry about it at the moment, that's something for the roadmap.

4) Wow, yeah, that is confusing. Why don't you start out with an empty map widget (without the location marker) or just a link that says "add a location" or something of that sort.

5) Yes, it is, and that's why it's important to let the user enter them. That you add them automatically is nice, but not always perfect, as you can see on one of your demos, http://mystorify.com/a/BjYb08qE. The first and the last fields are obviously not what you'd want there. Also, again the question, why not allow it as a tool to complement my story?

6) Exactly. =) Start out with a good automatic timeline, but let me edit it anyway. What if I have highly inhomogenous events? Perhaps, I don't know, two vacations to the same place. That would probably show up as a month or even a year display, but a gapped timeline would be better in that case.

First off, I think we need a more interesting way of compiling photos-especially focusing on trips-so this is a very interesting idea.

Two things:

1. I feel like collaborative album creation is one of the most compelling features you offer yet it is premium only. Would all collaborators need premium accounts or just the one setting up the shared album? Regardless, this is a very important feature which allows people that go on a life-changing trip together to share their collective memories. I want to be able to see the great photos my friend took in Venice after my iPhone died. I was there when he took them so they are as much a part of my memory as they are his and this means they deserve to be part of "our storify"

I think collaboration could be the key feature of the entire site.

2. Beaten to death already but you must change the name. You cannot just add two letters in front of a popular site name and claim it as your own. Also, I don't feel "mystorify" tells me much about what your site does. You can do better or find someone else to help.

These two (rather important) issues aside I really like the idea and am excited to see where it goes.

Yes, that is exactly our point with the collaborative album creation.

1. The issue is related to the way how the photos come to us. If it is via free account where we don't allow direct upload to our app, it gets a bit complicated with the collaboration. So our current intention is to allow collaboration only for premium accounts. However, we have to think a bit more about the prices and the target audience. We welcome new ides.

2. Yes, we get it.

Looks great, but just a quick one: don't charge $5 for premium product, it just doesn't like premium. Either give all features for free for launch period or charge more.

Hi, thanks for the feedback.

In fact, the free account has all the features of premium, except the possibility to directly upload photos which we haven't implemented yet.

Just trying the waters here with a concept that we wanted to get out ASAP, to see what people think of this kind of story visualization :-)

We definitely need to spend more time with the pricing.

There are also other things you could monetize that would make it easier for people to open their wallets.

Customization is probably a good thing, i.e. the subdomain and own-domain thing.

Physical stuff is always good, so I'd love to pay for an automatically created photobook/photobook-ready-PDF (I hate to do them in the crummy software supplied by the printer). Or, go one step further even and allow direct upload to Lulu. Basically a Make-your-own-coffee-table-book.

In any case, you might want to think about specifically targeting power users from the start, instead of going for the freemium market.

Thanks for the idea. Yes we have it on the road-map with our poster app http://47posters.com . Our problem now is that we have more products that we want to integrate, but now we have to focus on one. And also we have to make clear who to target. More users here suggested to target more focused audience with premium account (backpackers etc).

Hey, looks great! There's a slight bug that's kind of annoying though. When I click on picture to enlarge it (on http://mystorify.com/a/BjYb08qE) and use the back button, it scrolls down to Monaco, whatever the photo. I don't know if it's specific to the demo album or to me, but it makes the process of going through the trip's photos a lot less enjoyable!

Thanks for the report! Yeah the bugs that break the user flow are the worst, we are looking into it.

If you use the Close button or the back arrow on the top, that should work in the meantime.

Any thought to something like facial recognition to find photos of myself posted online without me being tagged or otherwise made aware? (Mostly thining posted to friends' facebooks, here)

What about the problem of other poeople taking photos and not sharing them? Anything we can do about that?

This is nearly identical to a feature in the newest version of iPhoto that lets you break up albums into sections with maps and weather information. Just thought you should be aware! (Disclaimer: I am working on a dead-simple storytelling app called Backspaces.)

We are aware of iPhoto thanks :) myStorify is based on a research that has been going on for about 2 years, so it is just unfortunate timing.. We try to push automation of the event segmentation (clustering) and couple other features like collaborative authoring of albums and a cool search (e.g. try searching for 'summer', 'switzerland', 'michal alena').

Interesting app.

I noticed some components were displaying the weather - is that current conditions, or are you showing what the weather was at the time the photo was taken (which would be more interesting).

It is showing the historic weather data of course! ;-)

Pulled from http://www.wunderground.com/

looks great - have been looking for a new home for all my public photos now posterous is not being further developed - have settled on g+ albums but not that happy with it

couple of things:

1 - Can you 'storify' all albums by defaults

2 - Can you change the sort order of the albums to Newest to Oldest

3 - What about videos - can i add youtube embed to a story ?

4 - Custom domains would be good

5 - Custom story/album url / slug would be good

Thanks! What are your pain-points with G+?

1) Although the storification is largely automated, it still requires some user input (event names) so we thought that it would't make much sense to pre-storify everything.

We are adding some graphics to distinguish between storified and non-storified albums in the user view.

Also the question is how to display the contents of an album if it hasn't been storified yet?

2) Yep, the albums should be sorted newest - oldest, the sorting is just buggy at the moment.

3) We were thinking about adding other media as custom nodes in the graph (and a corresponding representation in the main content pane) maybe on the same logical level as the current events or one level bellow visualized with a dot on the dashed line.

The thing with video is that normally you have a bunch of short clips from the vacation and if you don't feel like starting a cutting software or using Animoto, you would need a bunch of embeds, not just one in our opinion. So we should treat video the exact same way we treat photos - many short snapshots put together to create a story.

4) Do you mean subdomains like justin.mystorify.com? Yeah definitely on the ToDo ;-)

5) Once we have the subdomains this is plausible (because we don't have the user in the album url now to make it shorter - therefor it has to be unique).

thanks

re g+

- if on android/iphone and not using g+ app the albums/photos aren't so great

- urls are to longs and not presonalised

- if the users isnt logged into g+ there to much chrome around the albums

- photos are 2nd class g+ citizens

re 1 - thanks - ive about 100 albums on g+ - dont want to go and have to click into each 1 then click 'storify' just so the album contents display

re 3 - thanks - if video was treated just like a photo would be perfect

re 4 - both sub-domain and full domain - so i can point photos.mydomain.com to mystorify

re 5 - thanks - this is so i can email the link as photos.mydomain.com/london2012

You spelled "coming" wrong. "Comming soon" on the front page.

Thanks, fixed :) (there is one of these deeper in the app, but I don't feel like re-compressing our JavaScript includes right now :-D).

There's also "Cabel car" instead of "Cable car" in the Hammetschwand demo page.

This way it is more authentic. Users usually do this type of misspelling :).

I was really impressed by your app.

I have travelled a lot in the past and this would have been great for keeping people up to date (especially facebookless elderly relatives).

With this in mind, I think you should do away with the free option and up your premium price.

Edit: younger backpackers go travelling for long periods of time, their parents would think nothing of shelling out $5 /month to be kept in the loop!

Thanks :)

Do you think that a free 1 month trial + only premium afterwards would work better in this case than a freemium model?

We figured that there could be a large segment of casual day-trip travelers who like to share a story in a more optimized interface than on facebook. Probably many of these will not pay, but could serve for spreading the word through the freemium model and make the marketing easier.

I don't claim any specialist knowledge re:pricing (so bare that in mind while weighing up my response).

I'm not sure about the 1 month trial thing (I think your demo is strong enough that people will understand what your apps about). I get that you want people using it, then when they can't live without hit them up for some money, but you may be cutting your market in half as i'm sure there are a lot of people who travel for 2 weeks who would use your app for that period of time.

As for day-trippers, won't they just use facebook or flickr? I thought your app was better for proper journeys as you can include elements other than photos (google maps etc).

One last thought: My older relatives always used to make physical scrap books of their travels (with photos / tickets / maps etc) in them. A possible extra/alternative source of income could be to sell the physical version of their online "story" (again not necessarily for them to keep, but to give to other relatives)

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