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From snapshots to narratives

We are entering what seems to be the next phase in image management. Taking a cue from the formidable amount of images taken each day by individuals, photo hosting sites are realizing that storing and displaying images one by one as they arrive is no longer enough. Because it has become so easy to take pictures, people photograph too much and have no time, or desire, to edit them  making viewing them later a somewhat painful experience. Organized, curated, re arrange, and packaged, they can become exciting again.

Enters automatisation, reorganisation and optimisation. Snapchat was probably the first one to realize that photos want to be grouped together into an overall theme and sequence. By building Stories, it allows users to regroup all snapchats taken in one place, one location and one time ( how Greek tragedy of them) to be experienced as a story. Engagement, in consequence, rose.

Facebook knows it too. While not quite precisely glued together as a story, multiple uploads of images are now sequentially displayed in a linear format. But it is still the job of the humans to construct the narrative. Google is the latest to enter automated storytelling construct with its fully automated  G+ addition.

Google wants to take your pictures on an adventure ( click image to see full story)

Outside the giants, there are numerous apps that offer the same service, some we have reviewed here.  Exposure, Steller and a handful of others offer standalone apps for mobile photographers to construct a visual story from a group of their shots and share them.

All these companies have three thoughts in common:

– People are getting fed up of owning too many useless images and would like to easily edit them into something meaningful to others.

– Often, one photo is not enough to describe an event ( weddings, birthday parties, travels). While one or two pictures might do the trick for live sharing, they are not enough to relate the whole event.

– Photo stories take longer to view and thus are engagement boosters. Great for advertisers.

With this is mind, we will soon see other photo sites like Instagram offer  narrative building tools, probably partially automated. As Kevin Systrom recently said, Instagram wants to increase the time spent and what better and easier way than offer stories. It would not be surprising if it offered a social aspect to it – à la Snapchat – where multiple users can contribute to the same narrative.

Dropbox’s Carousel app will group all images taken around the same time and place together but that’s it.

 

Expect places like Flickr as well as Dropbox , Pinterest and Amazon to follow suit if they do not want to be left behind. With the addition of maps, commentary, sound, music and other multimedia options, Flickr, for example, could become once again the master of the photo domain by appealing to a more dedicated and creative segment of the photo creator space. Pinterest could offer stories inside boards, allowing users to re arrange pins in an organised sequential way.

Overall, the photo space is evolving. What was once the domain of the one stop snap is slowly graduating to better curated, longer narratives. Users are offered smart tools for building and publishing  stories, motivating them to share extended version of their experiences, grabbing more of their attention in the process. During the building part as well as the consuming one. And more attention is , after traffic, what motivates advertisers into paying more, more often.

Will the vast universe of picture-taking consumers follow in masses is doubtful. Even if helped by computer vision, smile recognition, GPS mapping, time stamping and other low-level AI, it still requires time and dedication. Both of which are in high demand and scarce. Some major events, like weddings, might motivate some to spend more time on them but most of our daily photographed subjects are far from being the topic of a photo essay. They are just documenting what we see, eat, feel one image at the time.

There is certainly a market for storytelling apps and service, if only to clean up our clogged photo archives. How big is hard to say. However, if users are willing to build and share them, there is certainly a lot of rewards to those who will display them, both in engagement and revenue. What is certain is that the boundaries between traditional publishers and users as publishers are getting more blurred everyday.

Photo by francesco [zione]

Author: Paul Melcher

Paul Melcher is a highly influential and visionary leader in visual tech, with 20+ years of experience in licensing, tech innovation, and entrepreneurship. He is the Managing Director of MelcherSystem and has held executive roles at Corbis, Stipple, and more. Melcher received a Digital Media Licensing Association Award and is a board member of Plus Coalition, Clippn, and Anthology, and has been named among the “100 most influential individuals in American photography”

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