Photosharing versus storysharing
The history of online photosharing goes back more than 10 years with Snapfish, Picasa, Photobucket and Flickr being the pioneers. Today Facebook, Picasa and Instagram seem to dominate the mindshare. See a good infogram on history http://blog.kissmetrics.com/history-of-photo-sharing/
Surprisingly little has fundamentally changed since the early days. Usability has of course improved significantly as browsers capabilities have improved. But photosharing is still sharing a few photos mostly without much further context. Pictures are powerful and can tell a lot, but if you look at someone’s pictures on Facebook, you often don’t really know what happened. You don’t have the same background information why a photo was taken, what was said or what happened just before or after. The photo doesn’t often capture the thoughts or feelings of the people in the event. This is why people love stories. A story is a narrative you can relate to and it highlights thoughts, emotions, relationships and can freely go into history or speculate about the future. Things that are at extremely difficult with photos. A photo on the other hand creates a very detailed picture of a person, scene or object in the viewers mind.
The combination of these two the photos and the story is a visual story. Bringing together the context and narrative what happened behind the photos, with the best visual images. A visual story is a much more personal and expressive way to share your photos, or a visually beautiful way to share your story.
Try comparing only the left photo below or only reading or hearing the story on the right. The combination is powerful :-)
- Chris
