Hey Story Maps Team,
As always, you all are doing such a great job building out this brand new template. While working with the new template after the UC release I found some things that could be fixed and could make the new template even more powerful. In addition I recently came across this GeoNet post by Stephanie Smith which covers many of the requests that I also was going to add. I thought I would add these requests here as well.
I would love to see the following:
- Increase the amount of user customization for font type, size, justification, spacing, colors, etc. in every block option and not just in the major theme settings.
- Ability for users to change dimensions of embedded content, if they choose, instead of being locked only to the app presets (maybe a css override option).
- Allow for images to "gallery" next to each other like in the cascade layout instead of only allowing stacking.
- Allow for adding content to sidecar like images and videos via a url instead of only uploading from a computer.
- Add the ability to embed a webpage into the sidecar.
- Ability to add small text for credits or notes in the side car. Right now there is not a clean way to give photo, video, or map credit.
- Increase map setting options beyond only allowing or not allowing a legend. It would be nice to be able to choose legend placement, if you wanted a home button or other basic map options. It would also be nice to have a pop-up option that does not convert the pop-up to a table layout.
- Add the option to have cards that are right image/left text card instead of only a left image option.
- Add a credits section or WYSIWYG html block to customize your own.
Here are some additional functionality requests/ things I've noticed while working with the new Story Map template:
Requests: (in addition to the above)
Issues:
You're the best! Thanks so much for making that fix
Hello,
I continue to try to upload a 20.3MB video and receive the error stating videos must be smaller than 50MB.
Perplexed,
Ashlee
Is the ability to click images to enlarge in the works as well?
Be able to switch panel placement for individual slides within the same sidecar.
Thanks for your feedback, Bryan!
> Is the ability to click images to enlarge in the works as well?
We don't have specific plans for that. Is there a reason you wouldn't just use a large size for the image if you wanted readers to see it in a large size?
> Be able to switch panel placement for individual slides within the same sidecar.
Hmmm, I don't think we'd do this since the basic experience of a sidecar is that text for each slide scrolls into the same space. If you want something like that you can simply put several sidecars in sequence and alternate panel placements between them.
I mean enlarging images like you can in Journal. You can put an image in the text area of Journal and there is an option to have the image enlarge when the user selects it.
When the user clicks the image it enlarges.
This is super helpful when adding images in the text area such as tables or figures.
However in StoryMaps, when using sidecar for instance, I can put an image in but as far as I can tell there isn't an option to allow the user to enlarge the image when selecting.
Each image is a different size also but show up the same size in StoryMaps. The first image is 2560 x 1759 and the second image is 1110 x 673.
As for the being able to switch panel placement for individual slides within the same sidecar, disregard, wasn't thinking things through.
I agree that this would be a very beneficial functionality to have ^
Ah, got it. Makes sense. We'll consider this for a future release.
Cool, thanks Owen!
Hello. I use StoryMaps with my students daily. After being used to the Expand button in the Story Map Series and in the Map Journal, I agree this feature would be a welcome return!