New Chronicle platform brings user photos together to create powerful visual narratives

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By Oliver Griffin May 15, 2017

Chronicle today announces the beta launch of its collaborative visual storytelling platform and iOS app. The platform empowers communities around the world to record their shared experiences and contribute to a collective, visual narrative. 

While billions of images are shared online every day, standalone snapshots are often lost in an endless feed. The Chronicle platform solves this problem, as it enables communities to preserve their visual histories, together.

“We created Chronicle to serve as a platform for the greater community, in order to record and easily access our collective visual history,” said Chronicle Founder and CEO Steven McBride. “We live in an increasingly ephemeral world, but with Chronicle, everyone’s moments come together to tell and preserve a community’s history.”

With Chronicle, multiple users add photos to a single interactive and chronological timeline on a specific subject. This creates a collaborative visual and ongoing record. The TimeSlider feature allows users to quickly travel through history to access content from past months, years, or decades. Photos include details such as date, title, description, location, source, and searchable tags. Chronicles can be public or private with optional moderation settings to ensure quality control.

Many organizations, subject experts, and other users currently utilize the platform to chronicle their stories. Iconic NYC-based establishments Webster Hall and Daredevil Tattoo, award-winning photographers such as Robert Zuckerman, and libraries across the nation use Chronicle to crowdsource local history. Meridian Library in Idaho is one of them.

“The beautiful thing about Chronicle is that anyone can contribute to the visual tapestry — the more perspectives we’re able to collect, the better chances we’ll have to appreciate the vibrancy of the city,” said digital librarian Hailey Roberts.

Chronicle was founded in 2016 by McBride, who has more than 20 years of experience in marketing, advertising, and new media.  He founded and led VisualMax, an NYC-based digital agency that developed custom media solutions for publishers and brand advertisers since 2001, including Yelp, TicketMaster, and Expedia.

“One of the best things about Chronicle is that it is crowdsourced and community-driven. It’s designed to tell the ongoing story about a place or subject from the different perspectives of all those involved,” McBride added. “In this, the platform provides our collective visual history, for the greater good now and in the years to come.”

 

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