Create new story
From the landing page of the Story Editor click ‘Create Story’ to begin.
Templates
The Story Editor includes a series of suggested templates optimized to make it even easier to create more engaging stories. To use a template, click “Create story” in the story editor and select the template of your choice. Then add your media, text and additional slides as you see fit.
Parts of a story
The story editor is broken into 3 parts, cover, component and credits. The cover is the area where you add your title, subtitle and cover image. Components house the body of your story in 3 types of displays, full screen, half screen and group. You choose one from the right panel and drag it between the cover and credits. The credit section houses relevant story credits. Everytime you need to add photos, video or Street View, you can find it in the right panel. Then you simply drag the content into your cover or component. See the sections below for more step by step instructions.
Choose a cover image
In the ‘Add content’ section of the right panel, clicking ‘Google Arts & Culture’ will pull up your collection. From here you can search your collection and choose a cover image. Simply drag the image into the ‘Story cover’ section. Then add your title and subtitle by clicking on the text box.
Best Practices
When creating stories to host on Google Arts & Culture, we suggest starting stories with full screen or half screen components and keeping to the character limit of 280 characters per slide. It is the best experience for the user and increases the likelihood of your story being read in full. Immersive components look sharp across multiple devices. Short, engaging, and easy to understand text encourages readers to continue reading. It is also important to keep the number of slides to a maximum of 10-15 per story, with short text throughout, for the best reading experience
Choose a component
There are several different components, located in the right panel, that you can add to your story to display your media and text. Choose a component and drag it into the space below the cover slide. After locating the media that you want to include, drag it from the panel into a component. The components in the main view of the story can also be reordered by clicking on the arrows that appear to the left of each component.
Full Screen
This component allows you to add a series of immersive content to your story. After you drag and drop the component from the right panel, you can add your media, choose your zoom levels, add the text of your narrative, and audio captions. Place multiple full screen components with the same image one after the other to create an immersive tour.
Transitions between slides
To make your story more impactful, you can change the transition between slides. You can fade, wipe, or direct cut between slides in the Full Screen layout. To get started, tap the transitions icon (
Note: this function is not enabled when the same slide appears in succession such as in an in-painting tour. The system will instead zoom between the selected points of focus on the image.
Half Screen Section
Click and drag this component into your story to have a section with a separate box for text and media. Stack two of these together with the text and image on alternating sides for a fun effect. You can choose what side you’d like the text and image to appear on by clicking the icons in the top left corner.
Group
This component allows you to showcase media side by side. Citations will be added automatically and you can add a caption underneath your group. You can add more media by clicking the add image icon located in the top left corner of the component.
Choose content
Inserting assets
You can use the right side panel to search for assets to add to your story. Click “Arts & Culture” and you will see the items you have uploaded to the dashboard under “Your collection.” Here you will be able to find the following asset types you uploaded to your dashboard:
- Image
- 360 image
- Street View
- Video
- 3d (see specifications)
Under “Favorites” you can find assets from the platform that you have favorited by clicking the heart icon on an item page. Under “3rd Party” you can find content from partners who have opened their collection for other partners to use. Once you locate the asset you want to use, drag it into a content area in your selected component.
3d Models
To integrate 3d models into your story, click and drag the model of your choice into your component. You can choose the positioning of your model by clicking the 3D editor button and turning the model to the desired position. Adding the same model to successive immersive slides will create a guided zoom of your model. You can find examples of stories with 3d models here.
Inserting Street View
You can use the right side panel to search for street views to add to your story. Use either the search bar or drag and drop the peg man (the little yellow doll) to select a Street View. Once selected, drag the Street View into your story by clicking and dragging the blue bar that appears under the imagery into your story component.
You can turn the street view into your desired position either by clicking and dragging in the image while it’s in the side panel or after you’ve dragged it into your story by clicking the edit icon.
Inserting YouTube Videos
You can use the right panel to search for YouTube videos to add to your story. Once you locate the video, drag it into a content area in your selected component. Best practice is to use videos from your own channel. 3rd party videos can be taken down by their owners and go missing from your story. You can choose the start and end time of the video by clicking the edit icon. The default is to play the full video. We suggest using video clips no longer than 90 seconds in your stories.
Audio
Audio files can be added by clicking ‘ADD AUDIO CAPTION’ in the text section of immersive slides. You can search your collection of audio from the audio panel after you click, and then drag the relevant file into the ‘Add audio file here’ section.
The journey out of the story
To make a richer, more intuitive user exploration experience, add hyperlink keywords to relevant content (stories, assets, entity pages, etc.). Think about where users will go next. At the end of a story, add in hyperlinks to relevant additional content, for example, add a link to other stories that complement the ones you are creating.
Credits
According to what images are used in your story, credits are automatically added to the end of every story in the form of a logo and the name of the institution. You can also add further relevant credits to this section.
Preview
Click the Preview link at the top right corner of the editor to review how your story will appear to the user. Always be sure to check this to make sure that everything is as you expect.
Mark complete
When your story is ready for publication, hit ‘Mark as complete’ and let your Google point of contact know that you have a new story for review. Making any changes will automatically revert this status, so be sure to click ‘Mark as complete’ if you make an adjustment after reviewing.
Common issues
For my immersive component, the zoom in the preview doesn’t match my selection in the editor. Why?
This might be because screen sizes are not always the same and the playback will try to make the image fill the screen while at the same time not cutting off any part of the image you selected in your crop view.
Why does the exhibit look different on my desktop versus my laptop?
Screen resolution and size may vary between devices which may cause slight differences when viewing a story.
I want to duplicate my story, how do I do that?
Contact your Google point of contact and they can take care of that for you.
How do I preview my story on mobile?
You can do this from your computer by opening up the developer tools in your browser. To open the developer console in Google Chrome, open the Chrome Menu in the upper-right-hand corner of the browser window and select More Tools > Developer Tools. You can also use the shortcut Option + ⌘ + J (on macOS), or Shift + CTRL + J (on Windows/Linux).