The tour

Everything it does, and the one thing it never does.

It never crops a picture. Around that rule there is a full library, a viewer, an editor, stories, a map, and room for the people you choose.

Library

A grid that respects the frame.

Rows are laid out so every picture keeps its own shape. Nothing is cut to fit a tile. This grid is live: change the width of your window and watch it rearrange.

Rows are drawn only while they are on screen, so tens of thousands of pictures scroll without a "load more" button. Search is instant. Filter by place, tag, color, camera or year, and jump through time on the right edge.

Select many at once to tag, move, date, like, download, trash or start a story.

A person in a wool jumper walks away along a black sand beach towards misty sea stacks. — Walking at Reynisfjara

A green headland and dark sea stacks under a pink evening sky seen from above. — Late light over Reynisdrangar

A blue river winds through a narrow canyon with steep moss covered walls. — Fjaðrárgljúfur canyon

Blue and white icebergs float in a glacier lagoon under an overcast sky. — Ice on the lagoon

Clear chunks of ice rest on black sand with waves breaking behind. — Diamond Beach

A chestnut Icelandic horse with a long mane stands in a grassy valley. — Icelandic horse

A jagged mountain ridge rises behind a wide flat of black sand under grey cloud. — Vestrahorn across the sand

An empty two lane road dips and rises towards a wall of red cliffs. — Road into the canyon

A woman in a brown hat seen from behind looks out over a wide desert plain. — Looking out over the canyons

A freestanding sandstone arch stands on a slickrock bowl under a fiery orange sunset sky. — Delicate Arch at sunset

The underside of a stone arch glows orange above a deep canyon at sunrise. — Sunrise through Mesa Arch

Two huge sandstone arches join overhead with a tiny figure standing beneath them. — Double Arch

A long row of red sandstone fins and spires sits below snow capped mountains. — Fins below the La Sal mountains

The library: a justified grid of photographs grouped by month, with filters on the left and a timeline on the right.

Viewer

The whole picture, then closer.

Open a picture and it fills the window, whole. A round magnifier follows your pointer. Scroll to change its strength. Click, and you pan and zoom the original at full size, in the same window.

Beside it: title, description, tags, place, camera, comments and likes. Videos play when opened.

A sandstone monolith shaped like a temple catches warm light on a wide desert plain.

Try it. This is the app's magnifier, working on a sample photograph.

The viewer: one photograph shown whole, with its details panel and the round magnifier.

Editor

Edit freely. The original stays.

Light, color, a tone curve, color grading, effects, crop, straighten, turn and flip. And 78 looks, from cinematic to faded film to black and white.

Saving makes a new copy. The server develops it from the full-size original with your settings and files it beside the original, which is never changed.

Cropping is your choice, in the editor, on a copy. It is the only place a picture is ever cut.

A wooden table seen from above is covered with plates of food while hands reach in.

A wooden table seen from above is covered with plates of food while hands reach in. With the look Teal shadows.

A wooden table seen from above is covered with plates of food while hands reach in. With the look Big screen.

A wooden table seen from above is covered with plates of food while hands reach in. With the look Ember.

A wooden table seen from above is covered with plates of food while hands reach in. With the look Deep woods.

A wooden table seen from above is covered with plates of food while hands reach in. With the look Slate.

A wooden table seen from above is covered with plates of food while hands reach in. With the look Silver retained.

These looks were developed by the app's own pipeline. Pick one.

The editor: sliders for light and color, a strip of looks, and the picture with the magnifier showing the edited result.

Stories, slideshows and reels

Pictures in order, with your words.

A story is a set of pictures told in order, with titles and text between them. Start one by place, by day or by moment, or pick pictures one by one. A picture can be in many stories.

Read it as a page. Play it full screen with one of ten pieces of music that come with the app, or add your own. Or make a reel: the story as one video file, tall or wide, with every picture whole over a blurred copy of itself.

A story

South coast of Iceland

Four days along the ring road in July, from the waterfalls in the south to the black sand at Stokksnes. It never really got dark. We stopped the car far more often than we planned.

A tall waterfall drops from a green cliff into a pool below. — Seljalandsfoss

A wide waterfall falls between mossy green cliffs onto a dark gravel riverbed. — Skógafoss from the river

A white church with a red roof stands above a field of purple lupins with sea stacks in the distance. — The church above Vík

South coast of Iceland

A reel, 9:16. The picture is whole. Only its blurred copy behind fills the frame.

Making a reel from a story: choose tall or wide, the music, and how long each picture stays.

A story read as a page: a title, text, and photographs shown whole in order.

Map and places

Where it all happened.

Pictures with a location appear on a map, each pin with a small bundle of uncropped thumbnails. Places are named from the file's GPS without calling an outside service.

For pictures with no location, set one for a whole selection at once. Shift the dates of a trip when the camera's clock was wrong, with an undo.

The map: pins with small bundles of thumbnails over a world map.

Sharing

Private, until you say otherwise.

Nobody sees your library unless you invite them. Each person gets a role, and their own switches for upload, edit, tag, comment and download. Spaces keep family pictures and studio work apart, each with its own people.

To show one story to the world, make a link. It opens that story and nothing else. Add a password, allow downloads, or let visitors add their own photos. Delete the link and it ends at once.

Roles and links, in detail

Role	Can
Owner	Everything, including people, spaces and settings
Editor	Add pictures, edit copies, tag, tell and share stories
Commenter	Look, like and comment
Viewer	Look

People and settings: the people invited to a library, with their roles and switches.

Reading the pictures

AI that works where you choose.

Turn it on and each picture gets a caption, a scene and a list of what is in it. Search understands meaning. Look-alike faces are grouped for you to name. Near duplicates are found. Places are suggested, never assumed.

It runs on a worker, a small program on a computer you own that asks your library for work. Or on a cloud AI provider you choose, with your own key: Claude, OpenAI, Google, MiniMax or any OpenAI-compatible address. Faces and search by meaning need a worker.

Nothing is shared between libraries. What a machine said is blue. What a person said is amber, and the person always wins.

Set up a worker

Your workerA program on your own computer

asks for work, sends back words

Your libraryyourname.imagestoria.com

signed links that expire

Your SpaceThe pictures themselves

What a machine read

A black and white border collie looks straight at the camera in a dark room.

petsdog

What a person said

dogborder colliejuno

With a cloud provider, the pictures being read are sent to that provider, under your account with them and their terms. With a worker, they go no further than your own machine.

Storage

Your bucket, your keys.

The hosted library keeps its pictures in your own DigitalOcean Space. You create it, you hold the keys, and DigitalOcean bills you, about $5 a month for 250 GiB.

The bucket stays private. Browsers fetch each picture through a signed link that expires. The layout inside is plain, so you can read it without us.

Connect a Space, step by step

your-space/
  originals/{year}/{month}/{item id}/IMG_4032.HEIC   the file exactly as you uploaded it
  display/{year}/{month}/{item id}.webp              long edge 1600 px, for viewing
  thumbs/{year}/{month}/{item id}.webp               360 px high, for the grid
  full/{year}/{month}/{item id}.webp                 only for formats a browser cannot show

People and settings: storage, workers and backups.

On a phone

No app to install. It just works there.

There is no app in a store. ImageStoria is a web app made to work well on a phone: the grid, the viewer, uploads and stories all fit a small screen. Add it to your home screen and it opens full screen, like an app.

Uploads take what phones make: JPEG, HEIC, PNG, and MP4 or MOV video, among others.

The library on a phone: the same justified grid, two or three pictures to a row.

The viewer on a phone: one photograph shown whole.

See it with your own pictures.

Try the demo Start free trial

The demo runs in your browser. Nothing you add to it leaves your device.