How to Share Snapchat Stories on the Web
UPDATE (1/29/2019) : I have shut down Story Boutique! It had its run (over two years). Pretty fun, but nobody used it.
Have you ever wondered why it’s not possible to share Snapchat stories on the web?
My wife and I make weird, goofy Snapchat stories. Like really weird.
I’ll be honest - most of the time, they are weird enough that I’m happy they’re gone after 24 hours.
But sometimes, it’s nice to hit “Save” and watch them later for laughs.
Say Goodbye to Boring Video
Have you ever watched an exported Snapchat video? It's literally just a video. Sure, you retain all the stills and movies from that story, but you can't skip through them like you can inside the Snapchat app. And it's kind of a bummer to sit through those still images waiting to get to the next one.So I decided to change that. I built a web app for it, in fact.
It’s called Story Boutique.
Share your Snapchat stories with the world
Story Boutique is the missing web view for Snapchat stories. After creating a free account, you can upload stories from your phone or your laptop.Story Boutique performs analysis behind the scenes your video files for scene breaks. This empowers you – and others! – to view them as you would within the Snapchat app.
Once you have an account, you’ll also have a profile where you can share your stories and link to your Snapchat and Instagram accounts.
If you haven’t noticed by now, you can also embed your stories on other sites using the code provided below the story!
Under the hood, it uses several open source tools, including Laravel and FFMPEG.
There were technical challenges with building the app, too. Accepting large file uploads is kind of tricky. I became quite familiar with Laravel queues and workers. And I created the front-end player from scratch using vanilla JavaScript.
What now?
Well, go check it out. Tell me what works and what doesn't.What’s the future of Story Boutique? We’ll see if anyone is interested in using it, and if anyone else is interested in sharing their weird Snapchat videos with the world.
If interest grows, so will bandwidth and storage costs. I’ll have to figure out a revenue model. And who’s to say Snapchat won’t come out with their own official web platform?
If no interest grows, maybe I’ll open source the app and release the StoryJS front-end code as an open source library.
Either way, this was an incredibly fun and educational project!