Weave Your Stories Through Materials Connected in the Cloud

We built Ponga to give you a way to wrap context around the stories you tell in photos. You’ve found a baby picture of your grandmother in the arms of your great grandmother. It’s touching and special, but are you really sure they are who you think they are?

Using Ponga, you can attach the documents you have to validate what you think you know, then share it as a starting point to compare notes with your cousins and learn more. Your guests will have access to your original sources right in context — a little like footnotes. Soon you’ll crowdsource the details and a fuller story emerges.

Using Ponga’s unique embedding features, you can copy and paste the link to documents from any public source to attach documents. As explained in #6 of the 12 Kinds of Content you can Add to a Ponga Picture, you can reference documents as easily as pasting a link. The approach works beautifully for documents from the Library of Congress, or maps from the Digital Public Library of America, or records and artifacts from local cemeteries, universities, and museums.

Your personal family historical records are less likely to be found in museums and libraries. If you find them, you can’t be sure the documents will remain accessible and inviolate. You can store them in consumer cloud-based services, and this Ponga Support article describes the procedure.

Whatever approach you choose, it should be structured, backed up and reliable regardless of subscriptions paid or computer access. You'll want these archives in a bit of the cloud that you control. When you add links into Ponga, you'll want control over who has access to the documents and know they're protected.

With sites like Google Drive, Dropbox, or Permanent, we've got you covered

Use any standards-based cloud storage provider to collect materials that support stories on Ponga. You can bring content in from anywhere but it can be especially convenient to keep your own content on a single provider. You might use your own storage or even create a special account for a given project, such as research on a given branch of a family.

What will YOU do with Ponga and cloud-stored content?

Oh, we’ve got some ideas…

• Photos: Reference individual photos, or just an album with every version of the same image families have collected. Add a folder, point to the folder with a link.
• Voice Recordings: Paste links to voice, music, audio files of any kind.
• Presentations: That family story your cousin Eldon presented at the last reunion might add color to your new research about the wagon train.
• Home Movies: Your aunt spent the coin to convert hours of old home movies into modern .mp4 files. Now you can store them on video sites like YouTube, or cloud storage and weave them into your own stories.

Virtually any kind of file type you want to attach to a Ponga picture, you can add from cloud-stored files. You can selectively make materials accessible with or without passwords, control what information previews, and compile information into shared family archives.

How does that work?

As with a website or blog, it’s easy to add linked content to a Ponga picture. Wherever embeddable content is available, that content will embed directly in your Ponga picture. All you do is copy the link, and paste it into a comment in a Ponga picture. That means that videos, PDF documents, podcasts, — even Google Street View will be playable from within Ponga pictures. Not all links behave the same way when pasted into Ponga.

To learn more, visit 12 Kinds of Content You can Add to a Ponga Picture.