Slideshow, sidecar, swipe, and embeds - (run time: 12 min)
In the block palette again you'll see an option called Slideshow which is currently in beta. With a slideshow you can create a series of presentation-style slides that your readers will navigate laterally. With slideshow, images, videos, web maps, 3D scenes, or express maps fill the entire slide background. You can add concise bits of text to each slide to provide context. The slide panel works like it does for a sidecar.
You can move the narrative panel around and adjust its width and transparency so that it doesn't interfere with your media. Slideshows are great for presentations but keep the text in each slide as concise as possible. If you have a lot of text break it up across consecutive slides instead of obscuring a large portion of your media.
A sidecar is a scrolling, slide-based block that has two layout choices, both of which provide powerful narrative tools. The floating panel layout makes visually striking media with short captions or descriptions The docked panel layout is optimal for longer narrative content, as it doesn’t overlap the media.
The docked panel is a split-screen layout with a scrolling narrative panel and a stationary media panel. You can have a mix of items within the narrative panel such as images, headings, and paragraphs of text. The media panel can have a photo, a video, map, 3D web scene, or embedded web content.
Notice the dark strip at the bottom of the sidecar in the builder (see above). This is called the slide panel, and you can use it to create and manage a series of sequential slides within the sidecar. Click the green plus to add new slides and as you add media content, you'll see thumbnail images start to populate the slide panel. Click on the little icon between the slides to control the speed of the fade from slide to slide. You can drag and drop thumbnails to change the order of your slides, and you can click the three dots below the thumbnails to duplicate, delete, hide a slide, or even add audio to the background of a slide. Duplicating a slide duplicates the media within it, including web maps and scenes. You can create the cool effect of map choreography by duplicating a slide with a web map and then changing the map's zoom level or turning layers on and off in the duplicated slide to have your readers focus on a particular geographic extent or set of data.
Images in the media panel automatically fill the space within it (below at left), which means that they'll probably be cropped. You can opt to have the media "fit" the space instead of "fill" it by clicking the gear icon and choosing the fit option.
The other layout option is a floating panel. Choose this when you want to showcase your content as full-size and when you don't have long explanatory text. You can include multimedia content within the floating panels. You can also adjust both the width and horizontal placement of your floating panels. You can also choose a transparent background for the panel, with options for light or dark text, only use this if your media has large consistently-colored areas.
Note that you can freely switch back and forth between docked and floating sidecar layouts without losing any content, via the gear icon in the slide panel.
Looking for more information about creating sidecars? Here's an instructional StoryMap about adding a sidecar to your story map.
Though it's not technically an immersive block, swipe lets you compare two images or maps side by side. It's especially great for comparing related map themes and It can also be used for then-and-now photographs. Creating a swipe is easy: Find Swipe on the block palette and you will see this:
Follow the instructions. Nearly all web maps will automatically sync; setting the location and zoom level for one map will adjust both. If need be, you can even add the same web map to both sides of a swipe block, then toggle layers on or off in the map designer to compare different data within the same map. Learn more with this step-by-step guide to creating a swipe block.
A map tour allows you to plot points on a map and add media content and narrative to those points that will display in either a side or floating panel (depending on the layout). There are two different types of map tour: Guided tour and Explorer tour. Each of those subsequently has two layout options of its own.
A guided tour lets you walk your audience through a set of places in sequential order. As readers scroll, the map's focus shifts from one tour stop to the next; accompanying text and media (photos and/or video) for that place are displayed alongside it.
Two layouts are available for guided tours.
Explorer tour offers a nonlinear experience. Points are plotted on the map, with a corresponding gallery of thumbnails in either list or grid form in the side panel. Clicking on any item on the map or in the side panel brings up its associated media and/or narrative information. The reader can browse the points in whatever order and to the extent that they like.
Configuring a map tour has much in common with authoring a sidecar or slideshow; the slide panel lets you add (up to 100), reorder, hide, and delete tour stops. You can add multiple images and videos to your stops, and you can also set the location and initial map zoom levels for each stop. To save time, adding geotagged media (like a photo taken with a smartphone) will automatically place a point on the map at those coordinates. To save even more time, you can start a tour by uploading as many images as you want; each image will populate your tour with one point.
Map tour is also highly flexible in terms of changing layouts as you go. At any point, you can click on the gear icon in the slide panel to not only switch between the layouts of the current kind of tour, but to jump to the other variety of map tour altogether as well. This transition is 100% seamless, with no content getting lost in the process.
StoryMaps also has the ability to incorporate other web content into your narrative, either as links or as fully interactive items. You can perform this via the embed block. Choose Embed in the block palette, and copy in a URL or iframe code.
The link, along with other types of pre-approved web content, appears in the story as a fully-interactive embed by default. But there's a second option that's accessible in the little menu at the top—display as a card. If you're not happy with the text or thumbnail that automatically appears in the card, you can edit it to give readers a better sense of what they'll see if they choose to click on the card. Just click the gear icon to adjust these settings.
Some web content will embed as a card by default, giving you the option to set it as a live embed if you so choose. Readers can interact with that content in-line if they activate it, or open it in a new tab. Anyone reading on a mobile device will always see embeds display as either cards or alternative media; given the size of smartphone screens, they'll have a much nicer experience opening the embedded content in a separate browser tab.