Storehouse: The Best Media Sharing App in the World Adds Lightroom Support

Every day, people are taking more and more fantastic photographs. The only problem is that they’re all stuck in the Camera Roll or Lightroom. What if there were an easy — I mean, actually EASY — way to share multiple photos and videos from your shoots along with text in a clean, media-centric, easy-to-view format for your followers to enjoy? Enter, Storehouse: the app that I, personally, am going to use exclusively to share my own content from this point forward. It’s that good.

 

While it’s been on the iPad since January, Storehouse’s iPhone-compatible app came out just over two weeks ago. When they contacted me about news regarding this week’s Adobe MAX announcements, I took the opportunity to interview CEO and co-founder Mark Kawano at Storehouse’s headquarters.

 

In just a few short minutes with Kawano taking me through the app that is already openly used by the likes of Chase Jarvis and Vincent Laforet, I became convinced that Storehouse is the single best way to share content online.

 

Storehouse is an iPad and iPhone application (they also have a web platform), that makes it incredibly easy to throw images, video, and text together into a post-like form. All you do is import the photos and videos you want to use for a new post (from your Camera Roll, services like Dropbox, or now, even images through Lightroom’s Creative Cloud) and watch the application instantly apply a beautiful layout for each image that's quite Tumblr-esque, but smarter...and better.

 

 

Now, normally WYSIWYG scares the crap out of me. Why? Because most WYSIWYG editors are more like What You See Is Only Sort Of, Kind Of What You Get. Storehouse has stayed true to the acronym, however, as their app presents a true WYSIWYG editor's dream. They’ve taken full advantage of the responsive touch display on iOS devices to let you easily tab and readjust anything in seconds — an experience that truly shines on the iPad and the iPhone 6’s larger displays.

 

 

Once images are imported, add a title and publish, or take your time to add areas between the images for text. Forgot to add an image? It’s still just one click away. Want to resize, adjust the crop, or move an image across the layout? Everything is unbelievably simple and second-nature. Videos, currently with a 30-second limit, auto play. Users can swipe between videos, gliding from one full-screen video to another as each instantly plays as it comes into view. It’s really something you have to experience before you really begin to grasp the significance of what Kawano and his team have created.

 

 

You can use your Storehouse profile as a location for viewing on its own, but they've has also made it incredibly simple to embed into any website by making an embed code available for any story you create using Storehouse. You can even adjust the story to a custom width within the embed code to match your website. And one of the best parts...no need to worry about the size or color profiles of your images: Storehouse even serves the right images for whatever device your viewer is on.

 

 

Now with support for the images you sync with Lightroom Mobile, you can easily add all those files that have been stuck in your library for months. Throw together short stories, longer features about your work, or a journalistic project. Treat it like a vacation blog, like an outlet for behind-the-scenes content from your shoots, like a bulletin board for all the quirky things life throws at you every day — you really can do anything.

 

Storehouse, currently a 15-person venture started by Timothy Donnelly and Mark Kawano (who you can thank for designing a plethora of UI elements in Adobe Photoshop, Bridge, and Apple's now-departed Aperture), has a few things up its sleeve, but they're hesitant to expand on what that means, exactly. All I can say is that their $8.5 million in funding will continue to power new features that conentrate on making it even easier to share amazing content in a way that doesn't dumb the content down or rain bad design on great work. Meanwhile, it's a good idea to grab your profile name and start benefiting from an app that really should charge something, if not a fortune, for what it delivers to its "hundreds of thousands of users."