YouTellYou Helps You Create a Picture Magazine

It’s interesting that everyday we hear how email is dead yet everyday I see someone using email in a new way. The benefit of using email is that it’s understood by nearly any Internet user as opposed to many of the new social networks that take time and investment to be able to effectively use.

Yesterday I spoke with YouTellYou founder Ruggero Domenichini to learn more about the service. YouTellYou is an easy way to create a photo magazine. The service can pull in photos from photo sharing services including Flickr, Smugmug, Facebook and you can also upload photos from your computer. The magazine can also include a Google Map so you can provide the location where the photos were taken.

Jolie O’Dell at RWW has a good review of the YouTellYou service from their launch back in January. She notes, “In about 10 minutes, we created this story about SxSW 2009. We were able to get access to all the needed Flickr photos through a simple interface. Pics were then organized into layouts of one or two photos per section with optional captions for most layouts.”

Since the initial launch, Ruggero has added email functionality that allows users the ability to email in their photos and captions to YouTellYou and it automatically creates the magazine. This is great for people traveling who want to share more than just photos. The service works a lot like Posterous in that you don’t need a YouTellYou account. Just email your photos to stories@youtellyou.com and the magazine will be setup and login information for future edits will be sent to you. In addition to photos, you can also include audio recordings in your online magazine. Here’s an example magazine using the email functionality.

I like the YouTellYou concept because it allows you to tell a story instead of just posting some photos. When I look back to my last vacation in 2006, my photos on Flickr are great for me to look at but when others look at the photos, some context might help understand more about the photo’s meaning.

Here’s a partial example of a YouTellYou magazine – Jolie created this based on her experiences at the SXSW conference last year.