[vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″]If you have an awesome story, your options for telling it are pretty much limitless.
You’ve got photography, social media, websites, blogs, videos, interpretive dance, painting, and of course, the good old-fashioned written word.
Storehouse, a new app on the iPhone, is a combination of it all. I couldn’t wait to try it out.
Last month marked my two-year anniversary at Team Creative Fire, and it’s been a pretty fabulous ride so far. So, I decided to take Storehouse for a spin, and weave my TCF tale with the various photos and memories that I’ve collected on my journey.
Check out my story, then read my review of the app below!
Let me start by getting my disclaimer out of the way. While I used the app on both my iPhone 5 and iPad Mini, the majority of my experience is coming from the iPad version. I didn’t see a lot of difference between the two, but I personally preferred the bigger screen.
First of all, Storehouse is a really nice looking app. I can see why it won a design award from Apple this year. The interface is really clean and minimalistic, which is probably what makes it so easy to use.
The simplicity of Storehouse is is both a benefit, and in my humble opinion, one of its detriments. For example, you can resize your photos and crop them down in order to format the way that they look together, but you cannot resize the text boxes. I wanted some of my photos to be side-by-side with the associated text, but I couldn’t make that happen.
Speaking of text, the formatting options are few, so if you are really looking to customize your story with special fonts or attributes, you won’t find that here. Your text options are as follows: Normal – a serif font; Header – a thin sans-serif; and Quote – another sans-serif, in bold.
I liked the Quote font the best, so I just used that one throughout, and while I think it would have been nice to have more options, I can appreciate the straightforwardness of only having three.
When it came to formatting the photos, I loved how the app automatically lined things up evenly. It took the guess work out of positioning or sizing the photos, which was nice.
I would have to say that my least favorite thing about this app is that it caps your elements at 50. I had to cut out some of my memories in order to make everything fit, which made me sad.
Another frown-inducing limitation is that your videos can only be 30 seconds or less. I had a 36 second video that I wanted to share, and it was frustrating to have to edit it down.
That being said, I think Storehouse really stands out with its ability to tell video stories.
Early on in the project, I found myself wishing for some kind of handoff capability between my iPad and iPhone. I started my story on my iPad, thinking that I would be able to login to the app on my phone and continue working there. No such luck. I suppose it wouldn’t have been a big deal if all of my photos were in the same place, but they’re not.
While you can’t alternate between two devices to work on story drafts, you can connect your Instagram, Dropbox, and Flickr accounts so that you can access your pictures stored in those places. That was a great feature.
Another element of Storehouse that I like is the fact that it’s a social network in itself. When you login to the app, you can follow other users, like and comment on their stories, or republish them on your own page.
One of my favorite things is that you can embed your stories right into a blog post, like this one!
If you visit the official website, you can see all of the wonderful, creative ways that people are using this app. Whether it’s to display fashion photography, share a new recipe, display a portfolio of your work, or chronicle a recent trip, there are a ton of ways you can use it!
Overall, I really enjoyed using this app to create my story. Part of me feels like it would have been just as easy for me to create something similar in a regular blog post, but the handful of standout components really made it worthwhile. More than anything, Storehouse is a new, super fun way to tell a story.
What do you guys think? Would you use this app? Have you tried it out? Let me know, and follow me on Storehouse so that I can check out your stories![/vc_column][/vc_row]
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