File upload problems when collaborating on Map Tour?

[LyttonSmith]

I'm trying to build a collaborative Map Tour with 11 collaborators. I am the Owner and sign in to ESRI through an institutional membership; they all also sign in through institutional memberships with the Publisher role. I created a Group and shared the Story Map application with them; I want them to be able to publish to the Story Map rather than the base layer. They can see and click the blue Edit button and also click to Add a tour point.

However, they cannot upload any image files; they get an "Error Uploading the Picture" message. I've tried uploading the same images with no problem, so it's not an issue with image size/quality. I've tried changing their status from Member of Group to Group Manager but that doesn't solve the problem. They've tried multiple browsers, to no effect. And they've completed all the other information in the tabs under Add, so that's not the problem.

Any ideas? I've looked here and here and even here. I'd be grateful for any insight, and apologies if I've missed a post dealing with this somewhere. I love the tool (though miss the Crowdsource option) and hope to use this with my classes going forward, but obviously need my students to be able to contribute directly if I'm going to do this. I know it's not a standard use, but the information makes it sounds like it's in theory possible?

[RupertEssinger]

Hi Lytton

Sorry about the issues you've add because your project sounds fun.

However Story Map Tour isn't designed for this sort of collaboration. With the exception of our older Story Map Crowdsource app, the Story Map apps are basically single-author/single-owner but with some ability for editing or management by several authors, or a single overall editor/administrator as described in the doc you referenced. It's not designed to be as collaborative as crowdsourcing. One of the caveats is that our place-based app templates, Story Map Tour and Story Map Shortlist, (which are the ones that people are often keenest to collaborate on because they assemble large sets of places), store the places that are authored in an associated web map that is managed automatically by the builder, and in the case of a Map Tour built by uploading images, an associated feature service too. So for the place-based apps especially, there are a lot of moving parts that make collaboration hard and not easy to set up. At least, I don't know if anyone has been able to set up what you are describing. 

One more collaboration possibility that we should also mention is setting up a Google Sheet that you add into a web map as referenced data. If that Google Sheet uses the data schema that the Map Tour expects (see the sample CSV file you can download from the Story Map Tour builder's Advanced options in its Welcome dialog), you can publish the web map as a Map Tour and then multiple editors can edit that Google Sheet and those edits can get reflected automatically in your Map Tour. Shortlist supports the same workflow. The big drawback with this workflow is that it requires that your pictures are referenced via URLs as attributes in that table, and putting images onto the web so they can be referenced that way is not easy and only really aimed at people with access to web servers for hosting, so unless that's the environment you are working in, it's a lot of work.

So I think in general the best way for a class to collaborate on a Story Map is to do the collaboration on the editorial/content assembly part of storytelling, rather than the technical part. Even without the difficulties mentioned above, I think this can be a good approach. So a class could be divided up and responsibilities assigned for assembling the content for a Tour (concept, overall story, title/subtitle, choosing maps and what layers they will show, pictures and their captions, story color and layout, story social media appearance, proof-reading, etc) and then have one person actually build it. You could even have multiple people building the tour, but simply working in shifts with the same account. We do that quite a lot! People responsible for pictures and captions could email that content to the person building the story. I know it doesn't sound super high-tech but might be good approach, especially as it matches pretty closely how a lot of Esri customers are creating story maps in their organizations, and how we create stories in our team here. The technical part of actually building a Story Map from the editorial content is pretty straightforward, it tends to be researching and assembling that content that is the harder but more fun part. 

Or perhaps other with experience of this would like to weigh in?

Rupert