Apple Alum Creates the Slickest App for Sharing Photo Stories

Storehouse, a new photo-sharing app, is out today for iPhone. Storehouse

Remember the days of Facebook photo albums? Yeah, that was a long time ago. There was a time, before Instagram became our go-to photo sharing app, that we would upload photos into an album and add clever captions detailing our backpacking trip to Europe or that bachelorette party we went to in Vegas. You could argue posting an album to Facebook was about storytelling as much as it was about digitally archiving our experiences. There was context, and to a certain extent, narrative involved. It was kind of nice.

Today, most of us tell our stories in snippets—quick, filtered hits with a word or two underneath. As we scroll through our feeds, we see hundreds of different one-photo stories that do little little more than tease us with information about what’s actually happening in the lives of our friends. It suits our frazzled attention spans, but every so often I find myself wanting to know more than Instagram is able to tell me.

Storehouse, a new iPhone app from Apple alum Mark Kawano, is bringing back photo-centric storytelling, and it looks a helluva lot better than your Facebook photo albums. The app (free) has been out for a while in various forms. First on the iPad, which proved to a perfect home for its emphasis on multimedia and text. Then it moved to the web, where its big picture layout shined on the desktop format. Today, the company is launching an iPhone app in an attempt to contend with the likes of Instagram for your mobile attention span.

Don’t get the two mixed up, though. They’re completely different. If Instagram is a picture frame, Storehouse is a photo album. “These aren’t all hero shots,” Kawano explains. “With a platform like Instagram, every picture is the hero shot. You’re not going to look at how the menu was designed or the details on the flowers; you’re going to look at the bride and groom.”

The company’s focus is on giving its users the best tools to tell their stories visually. In a lot of ways, Storehouse is like photo-blogging; it’s a place where you should expect to spend some time creating and sorting through posts. The big challenge with that, of course, is how do you translate the depth of blogging to a mobile, fast-moving world? “We designed it so you could create an entire story with just your thumb,” says Kawano.

The iPhone app is equipped with an in-app camera, which allows you to snap photos on the go and upload them directly to Storehouse. You can also grab photos from your camera roll, Flickr and Instagram. For each post you can add up to 50 photos and videos. You can add context with headers and formatted text, which you drag around on screen to create a cohesive narrative.

It’s funny, when you look at your photos on Instagram’s web app, they often look grainy and constrained. Its an efficient presentation, if not exactly pleasing. Storehouse has a way of taking the photos you have stashed on your phone and turning them into something more polished. If you’re a brilliant photographer your photos will look amazing on Storehouse. If you’re a novice with a shaky hand, they’ll still look pretty damn good. It’s not a matter of masking photos with filters—the app has a bare bones suite of editing tools that lets you tweak, resize and reposition your pics and videos. It’s more a matter of presentation.

Storehouse on iPad. Storehouse

You scroll through the stories in a feed and expand on them by clicking.  You can like, republish (basically a retweet) and follow, just like every other social app out there. So in that way it’s easy to get lost in the content. The caliber of photography is good so far—a lot of professional photographers and publications like National Geographic and GQ have already adopted the platform.

Part of the reason Instagram has been so successful is because of how easy it made creating and viewing photos. Storehouse is not Instagram-easy; it’s the type of app that rewards patience. Is it more work? Sure? But you also get a lot more in return.

Download it here.

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