Why cant I upload a picture?

[KaylaCharters]

I changed my title to publisher, thinking I would be able to directly upload my photos to my story map, but it still it not giving me the option...What am I doing wrong? 

[OwenGeo]

Hi Kayla,

Sorry you are having an issue getting photos into a story map.

What story map app are you using? There is a list of story map apps here: Apps | Story Maps. Can you share a screenshot of where are you expecting to see an option to upload photos?

Owen

[KaylaCharters]

I believe I am doing a story map journal...It only gives me the option to upload from web...

[OwenGeo · Accepted solution]

Kayla,

Thanks for the screenshot. At this time Map Journal doesn't support uploading images directly in the builders (Cascade, Crowdsource, and Map Tour are the only ones that do right now). Flickr is currently the recommended way to host images for a Map Journal.

But we're working on adding that feature to Map Journal and it should be available in the next update at the beginning of December.

Owen

[KaylaCharters]

Thanks for the insight. Which app did the Moreno Valley story map from the gallery use? I assumed it was that one... 

[OwenGeo]

HI Kayla,

Moreno Valley seems to have two stories in the gallery. One is a customized version of the previous generation Shortlist and the other is a Map Journal.

Owen

[KaylaCharters]

It looks like they added their own pictures to a map journal... How did they do that? 

[OwenGeo]

Kayla,

The recommended way to add images to a Map Journal is to upload them to Flickr. This optimizes the photos for display on the web and makes them load very fast. You can also use Google Photos (see this blog post for more info).

If you aren't able to use Flickr then you can host images on your own web server or a file storage service like Amazon S3 that lets you provide direct web access to uploaded photos. If you go this route you'll want to make sure your images are compressed and properly sized before uploading them to the web. We recommend using a width of between 1500 or 2000 px for images in the main stage and 750px wide for images in the side panel. If you enable the zoom control for a side panel image, you should also use 1500px wide for that one too. 

You can compress images using most free or paid image processing tools. Use a image quality of around 80%.

Owen