Capturing Oral History in a Ponga Picture

As a member or a contributor, you can add memories to any selection in a picture with the compelling quality of the human voice. Since ambient noise or computer fans can be a problem, it’s best to do this with a microphone or headset. How it’s attached will vary depending on the kind of computer you’re using but if the quality is good enough for a video call or FaceTime, it will probably work fine.

Once you’re comfortable just click the record button and you’ll see the waveform appear as you record the story.

If you’d like to include a story that was previously recorded or a video story, you can do that with a link. Just find the link (YouTube.com, SoundCloud.com, and other cloud-based media hosting sites work very well,) and paste it into a Ponga picture.

The power of the human voice, or the subtle micro-expressions as a person tells a story can be one of the most powerful elements of storytelling this way.

Pre-recorded audio

Sometimes those wonderful storytelling moments just happen at the kitchen table, in the car, or by the lake. Our advice is to capture those moments too. If you've got a modern smartphone like an Android or iPhone, you're more than likely to have a voice recording app available as well. We recommend you simply pull it out, tap the record button and put it discretely in front of your loved one telling a story. Usually that's all you have to do.

To add that audio to Ponga isn't hard, but how you do it might depend on how you captured the audio (or video) and what cloud storage resources you have available to you.

We also have a handy Ponga Hands-On Guide to adding audio recordings for oral history to Ponga pictures. It goes into detail about using cloud storage sites to bring voice recordings into your Ponga pictures in context. We'd be happy to send it to you via email, just drop us your name and email address in the form below.

As always, we're here for you in Live Chat in the bottom left of the window if you have any questions at all. 👋