The first time I saw Dustin Curzon’s presentation about his new online photo “storytelling” platform, Narrable.com, I knew I had to create an album of old photos as a Christmas gift for my mom.
Narrable is not just another site to store and share photos. It’s a place where you upload photos that have the most meaning to you and add context to them with voice narration. Dustin is Narrable founder and “chief storyteller.”
Narrable formally launched earlier this month with the first five “narrables,” or photo albums, free of charge.
So I signed up last night and created my first storytelling album of photos. The process involved scanning, uploading and describing the action in the photos. In the end, I chose 14 photos that I thought Mom would most enjoy seeing and hearing as living memories.
From start to finish, the project took me perhaps an hour and a half. Much of that was the tedious process of selecting and scanning photos.
Once the pictures were into the computer, uploading them to narrable.com was no problem. Then I faced the real challenge; what did I want to say about each photo that would interest the viewer and listener?
I sketched out a script only for one photo and winged it on the rest. Turns out, I think I should have scripted them all. I do have the option to go back in and re-record the photo narration.
Narrable is full of helpful hints on how to upload the photos and create the voiceovers. I chose the phone option to upload the voice descriptions. That required me to input my phone number plus area code, then answer a call from Narrable for each of the 14 photos before recording commentary.
This morning I learned that Narrable plans to make it easier to upload voice commentary directly for each photo through the built-in microphone of a computer.
When all the photos and commentaries for my project were uploaded, the next step was to share the album. I tested that by emailing a link to the Narrable page to my wife. She clicked on it and the album quickly loaded to her computer.
So, now I’m set on go to share this special page with Mom on Christmas Day.
The album includes photos and memories from more than 40 years ago when my dad was an Army sergeant and stationed on the island of Okinawa. Dad passed away this past August, so I know the Narrable.com photos and commentary will have a special meaning for her.
Merry Christmas, Mom.
