In my previous post I talked about how much I was enjoying storytelling using Exposure, a website that makes it easy to create gorgeous photo narratives. In a similar vein, I’ve also been enjoying a new app which does something very similar. It’s called Steller and it’s a bit like Instagram, but it lets you post sets of images arranged into stories, rather than individual pictures.

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To make your story you choose images from your iPhone, adjusting the order as you like. You can add words to images, specifying the font, size and position, or create text-only slides on a white background. You can also include videos. The result is presented as a flip-book album of full-screen images. As with Instagram, you can follow other users but in Steller you can also reshare their posts to your followers. Stories are also arranged in collections, and you can browse and follow collections too. As with Exposure, your choices are deliberately limited so that it’s difficult to make bad choices. As result, you’ll quickly find yourself producing some really professional-looking results.

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Steller has only recently launched, so there’s a great sense of excitement within its small but growing community, just as there was in the early days of Instagram. Posting multiple pictures lets you say much more than you can with a single image on Instagram, but it’s much less hassle than creating a blog post. Like Instagram, Steller is designed as an app, but posts also appear on the web, which means they can be shared to other social platforms.

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What’s not to like? Not much. Steller works in portrait orientation, which is bad news if you only shoot landscapes or squares (you’ll just have to crop images, or add white borders). So far it’s iPhone only, though iPad and Android versions are promised soon. But having used Steller for two weeks I find that Instagram seems rather flat and one-dimensional by comparison, because it can’t tell stories. And as you may have noticed, I’m obsessed with telling stories at the moment. If you have an iPhone, give it a try!

Kirstin