Help › Telling a story

Telling a story

The only part of this she has to do, and it is one tap.

1. Tap the photo. The words under it say so.
2. Tap Tap to start talking — the big red button.
3. Talk. Nothing is counting down and nothing runs out.
4. Tap the button again when finished. It is tap-to-start and tap-to-stop, never press-and-hold.

Drawing on the photo

While she is talking she can draw on the photo with a finger. Circle a face as she says the name, and the circle appears at that exact moment for whoever watches it later — then fades, so the photo is not left covered in ink.

• Undo the last mark is on screen the whole time she is telling a story. It stays put when there is nothing to undo, and says so, rather than appearing and disappearing.
• Drawing only does anything while she is telling a story. Outside a story, a finger on the photo does nothing.
• Each side of a print keeps its own drawings.

The small camera window

A live view of her own face sits in the corner, so the story has a person in it and not only a voice. It is ready before she starts, so the first ten seconds is not her getting comfortable.

• The outline is solid when she is framed and dashed when she is not — the shape is the signal, not the colour.
• It follows her face and zooms so she fills the frame. Nothing about that leaves the tablet.
• Closer and Further override it for a few seconds if it has picked the wrong thing.
• She can drag the window to a different corner and it stays where she put it.
• Camera off turns it off for that sitting. Her voice is unaffected, and it comes back on next time.

Playing one back

Tap a story in the list beside the photo. The controls replace the list entirely, so she is never offered a microphone while her own voice is coming out of the tablet.

Play, Pause, Back 10 seconds, Forward 10 seconds and Stop, each one an icon and a word. Position is a bar and never a number — a figure counting down is a deadline. Back to the photo leaves.

If she had the camera off for part of a story, the window says Camera was off in words rather than freezing on a stale frame.

More than one story about one photo

Perfectly normal, and rather the point. The list shows how many there are with arrows to move between them. Different people can add their own to the same photo.

If something goes wrong mid-story

Stop and start again — the first one is kept, and she can delete whichever she does not want. Nothing has to be right first time.

Next: the back of a photo →