The Guide
The Guide - contents The Storyus Guide

Reading

For everyone - whatever your role

Arriving Your front page Who sees what Ways to read Views & bookmarks

Creating

For members, admins and owners

Getting started Photos & media Journeys Streams Moments Postcards Video Essays Reflections Albums Timelines Magazines Publishing & reach

Admin

For owners and admins

People & roles Collective setup Housekeeping

Junior Mode

For guardians and their young storytellers

The idea Being a guardian What your child sees

Creating · chapter 2 of 13

Photos & media

Uploading, the library, folders, fixing images - the raw material of everything.

Every story form here draws on the same well: your collective's media library. Get photos in early and generously - a story is often just the last five minutes of work on top of photos you added weeks before.

Adding photos

Create → Add photos opens the uploader. Drag a batch anywhere onto the card (or click to pick) - up to 50 at a time, JPEG or PNG, at least 500px along each side. Uploads run in parallel, so a big batch is a kettle's-worth of waiting, not an afternoon.

storyus.life/+yours/$mediauploader
The Add photos uploader: a drag-and-drop card with folder, collection, category and tag fields
Set the folder, collection, category or tags first - they're stamped on everything you upload next.
The metadata selects apply to what you upload next - so if half the batch is "France" and half is "Italy", set the tag, drop the French photos, change the tag, drop the rest. Tags matter more than they look: a Journey builds itself from a photo tag.

Video files have their own uploader (MP4 or MOV, up to 200MB, five at a time) - for bigger film ambitions see the Video chapter.

The library

Everything lands in Browse media - the collective's shared library, filterable by collection, tag, category or uploader. This is also where photos get fixed: every image has an Edit Image that opens its details.

storyus.life/+yours/$browsemedia
The media library: a filterable grid of the collective's photos
One library, shared by the whole collective - every story form picks from here.
Edit Image - details
The image details editor: title, caption, people, tags, captured date, collections and categories
Title, caption, the people in it, tags, and - crucially - the captured date.
Dates do quiet heavy lifting. Most photos carry their captured date (and often GPS) from the camera, and Storyus reads it - it's how journeys order their stops and archives stay lived-in. Scans and screenshots arrive dateless; give them one here and they'll sit correctly in time. The Embedded data button shows everything the photo brought with it.

Try it now

Upload a handful of photos from one remembered day, tagged with something like that-day. The very next chapter turns that tag into a walk on a map - the best trick in the whole product, and it starts right here at upload time.

Still stuck after the guide? Help & ideas - write to us, and a person reads every message.