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 batch detail fields, and the Add from Google Photos button below
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.

From Google Photos

If your family's archive already lives in Google Photos, you don't need to shuttle files through your downloads folder. In the uploader, Add from Google Photos opens Google's own picker - search your library the way you always do, choose the few that matter, and they arrive here at full quality with their taken-dates intact, carrying whatever folder, collection and tags you set first. Google Photos holds the bulk of your photos; Storyus is where the curation takes place.

Two things don't come across: videos (this route is photos only) and location data, which Google withholds from every photo it hands over. You can add places to imported photos here on Storyus - the Journey mapper is made for it.

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.