Perusing my Zite feed the other day, I stumbled on Storehouse, a brand new app and service for the iPad. The app was co-developed by an ex-Apple designer who worked on Aperture and iPhoto, and it really shows.
It describes itself as "the easiest way to create, share and discover beautiful stories...and I took it to task to quickly produce and process The Indigo People, a gallery of my images made in the north of Vietnam, as I recently announced a photo expedition-workshop to the region for September 2014.
It was quite a simple and quick process to upload the gallery of my images, and add a few text paragraphs. Storehouse allows you to import images or video clips from your camera roll, Dropbox, Instagram or Flickr...and I could re-arrange these images at will, by moving them around the "page" and by cropping them to fit the space I wanted for them. Interestingly, the cropped images are cropped only on the layout, but when clicked, they appear in full size. The limit for photographs is 50.
My next step is to try its video uploading feature. There's a time limit for videos, and it is 30 seconds. Hardly enough time to tell a whole story, but enough to grab the attention of viewers. Videos can be used for the cover of the story, and that can be very effective.
It's certainly a gorgeous app, and one that should be popular with storytellers, photographers and such. How it'll be eventually monetized remains to be seen.
I toyed with the idea to use it as a multimedia tool on my photo expeditions-workshops, but it's currently limited to be a simple but gorgeous storytelling tool. There are a number of similar apps available, and whilst I have not used them, I gather that Storehouse's philosophy is different.
