Getting started

Claim your handle, set up your public site, and find your way around the studio.

Welcome to Photostories — a home for your photos and the stories behind them. This guide covers everything you can do, from publishing your first story to customizing how your site looks.

Claim your handle

When you sign up, a short setup wizard walks you through three steps: choosing a handle, adding your name and avatar, and picking what best describes you.

Your handle is your address on Photostories. If you choose alice, your public site lives at alice.photostories.co. Pick a name to build your portfolio — you can change it later, though only once every 30 days.

Warning

Although we give you the option to change your handle, we don't recommend it. Your handle is your web address, so changing it has real costs:

Old links break. There is no redirect — your previous address (old-handle.photostories.co) simply stops working, so any link you've shared, or that anyone else has linked to, leads to a "not found" page.
You lose your search ranking. Search engines index your site under its current address. Change the handle and those indexed pages disappear; search engines have to find and re-index your new address from scratch, and the ranking you had built up does not carry over.
The old handle is freed. Once you move off it, someone else can claim it — and you can't get it back.

If you do need to change it, do it early: the longer a handle has been public and indexed, the more you stand to lose. Please choose it wisely when setting up your site!

Your public site

Every storyteller gets a public site at their own subdomain — alice.photostories.co. It is read-only and needs no sign-in to view, so you can share it with anyone. A profile band — your avatar, name, location, and bio — sits above each page and doubles as the navigation between them:

Gallery (alice.photostories.co/) — your home page: a grid of your individual photos.
Stories (alice.photostories.co/stories) — the photo stories you have published.
Map (alice.photostories.co/map) — your location-tagged photos plotted on an interactive map (turn it on in Design).

The studio

Everything you create and manage lives in the studio at photostories.co/studio. From here you can:

Write new stories or edit existing ones in the editor.
Organize your gallery.
Design how your site looks.
Update your account settings.

The rest of this guide walks through each of these in turn.