Storytelling With the Disney Story App

Disney recently invited me to have a closer look at their new app, Story. You may hear Disney and assume it’s an app for your kids. Nope, it’s an app designed for you as Disney looks more closely at the broader family market.

I am not a scrapbooking mom, but the Story app has scrapbooking appeal. Disney envisions its user as “mom on the ground as a storyteller pulling moments together in a capital-S Story.” Essentially, Story lets you pull images from your iPhone’s photo gallery and edit them together within a themed album that you can format and caption into a coherent story to share with your friends and family.

I thought I’d give Story a try using some of the pictures from our recent spring break trip to Phoenix. Getting started is easy. Photos from your gallery are loaded into the “My Moments” section, and you can also start a blank story by using the new story icon. You can choose your theme from one of five attractive options, including four stylish themes for the design-minded and one Mickey Mouse theme for the Disney-minded.

Then you get to work adding pictures, videos, text, and captions, dragging pictures around to create different page layouts. This wasn’t immediately intuitive but I quickly got the hang of it. Making some semblance of a coherent story was really easy, though I wish there were more options for how captions are shown. (Mostly they’re shown with large, cut off type that you have to click on to read.)

When you’re finished, you can email your story and share it on Facebook. Both of these link to the Disney Story server where you can view the finished work. While on the server, though, you can grab the embed code and stick it on your blog, like so:

This is where things get really interesting. I find galleries a pain to set up, but with this Disney Story embed, there’s a gallery with captions easily made, uploaded, and shared. I could see using it for more personal stories on my blog, and as a way of telling a story in a more interesting way to friends on Facebook.

The Disney Story app is totally free, so definitely worth a try. The future may hold additional free features and add-on purchases such as additional themes, voice notes, music, print on demand services, and publicly viewable areas on the Story website.