Articles, Posts, & Videos

Adding media like video, documents, and voice recordings is a great way to add engaging detail to your pictures. This 12-point article walks you through the steps to add 12 different kinds of linked media into a Ponga picture. The examples set you up to do this for yourself either as a Ponga member or even as a guest. Explore and have fun!

Telling stories is great fun. Great storytellers have a knack for rounding out the details to make a story especially dramatic, suspenseful and even silly. Stories told to entertain may not be entirely truthful, which is fine because they’re just fun. Stories told to document history, are another matter entirely.

The stories in your Ponga pictures should be shared, so we designed Ponga so that our members can invite as many free guests as they like. Plus, since you always own your own pictures, you are also always in control. This best practices tip walks you through a few considerations for sharing that may help you get the most out of Ponga and your family photos.

Formal oral histories take considerable skill to do well, but you can capture precious memories in a click.

It could become a narrative, for example, built on familiar characteristics like red hair or height that can be recognized across generations. Collecting the “intergenerational doppelgängers” into a single album can create a fun story to families to share.

By looking at an object, we intuitively consider it from different points of view. When you hold objects cherished by a loved one, it becomes easy to slip into their shoes, imagine them using it, and how they felt about it. In this article, we’ll focus on objects and artifacts, and how these ordinary things can be used to tell stories about our family and the people around us. You’ll learn about how photographing these objects not only helps document why they were important, it also preserves the stories so they can shed light on the people who owned, loved, or used them.

Recordings of Zoom sessions can easily be added to Ponga pictures so you can retell stories in context.

You have documents, images, … you want to connect to your Ponga pictures, but you want want to keep your own archival copies of the documents and not rely on access through other sites. There's a solution to that!

Depending on whether you were there or how old the photos are, it can be hard to know what was going on or even name the characters. Without characters and stories, family photos are just stock photos.If you know anything about Ponga, you probably know we're very good at putting names to faces and we do it so you can place the characters get to the stories. Ponga uses fancy tech to do this but really, it's not unlike what a really skilled person does if they have perfect recall and never forget a face.

Ponga pictures and albums you create are private, only you can share them. These are collected best practices for inviting contributors.

Moments are easier than memoirs. Starting with a journalist’s five starter questions, “who, what, when, where, why, and how,” builds a framework of facts. You can then get into feelings, motivations, and expectations with sensorial questions about fragrances, textures, temperature.

What you say in your living room is not the same as you might say in the public square. Ponga creates a way to share stories in an environment where you know who exactly can see your stories.