Room Types & Content Guide

Room Types

StoryKeep museums are organized into rooms — each room is a distinct experience with its own content type, layout, and interaction model. Rooms appear in the hallway navigation and can be opened, closed, or marked as under construction independently.

The room list is not ours: it is the founding vision. Piet’s February 2026 briefing framed the museum as “a private archive of films, photographs, places, and time” and named the exhibits before a line of production code existed — films, story collections, a slideshow room, a map, a timeline, a family tree. Every room below descends from that list; each room’s page opens with its founding intent, quoted and attributed.

Room	Status	Description
Photo Gallery	Shipped	Photographs and photo sets with optional audio narration and video stories. Three browse modes: list, grid, parallax gallery.
Cinema Gallery	Shipped	One long-form film treated as an event — Foyer and Screening, one continuous player.
Story Collections	Shipped	Short stories in many voices — theme bands, portraits, and a quiet story player.
Family Tree	Planned · Oct 1	Interactive genealogy visualization
Map	Planned · Oct 1	Geographic storytelling with location-pinned content
Timeline	Planned · Oct 1	Chronological story navigation

How a room reaches the museum

The shared model, documented once here; room pages link back rather than repeat it. A room is configuration + content + a sync:

flowchart LR
  A["Families registry\n(StoryKeep config base)"] --> B["Family config base\nCollections + Rooms rows"]
  B --> C["Content base\n(Photos / Films / Stories tables)"]
  C --> D["Drain\n(6h cron · Sync now)"]
  D --> E["Neon served store\n(+ media on Blob / Vimeo)"]
  E --> F["Museum room route\nroom.type → component"]

• The Families registry points each family at its config base and scopes it per environment (stage / prod).
• The family’s config base declares its content sources (Collections rows: type, base ID, status) and its rooms (Rooms rows: slug, type, status, bound collection). A room routes by its Type — photo-gallery, cinema-gallery, story-collections — to the matching museum component.
• The content base holds what the room shows; each room type reads specific tables and fields (see each room’s “Setting it up”).
• The drain syncs Airtable into the Neon served store on a 6-hour cadence, with a curator-triggered Sync now for on-demand publishes; visitors are served from Neon, media from Vercel Blob and Vimeo.

Caution

Airtable structure is work in progress (as of 2026-07-03). The curation surface is changing under ADR-004 — curation moves into the museum itself, and Airtable retires verb by verb. Field names and tables shown across these pages are current today but will drift; treat every Airtable screenshot as provisional.

Note

All screenshots on this page are from The Ashworth Collection — the public demo museum (public: true, no login required). Ashworth uses fictional content so real family data is never exposed in documentation or demos.

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Photo Gallery Room

The first and most fully-featured room type. Visitors browse photographs organized as individual photos or curated photo sets, with optional audio narration and video stories attached.

Gallery Views

Three ways to browse the same content:

List View (default)

A vertical feed showing photos and photo sets with titles, dates, photographer credits, and story previews. Photo sets display a cover thumbnail with a play badge when media is attached.

Grid View

A compact photo grid for scanning the full collection at a glance. Titles and metadata are hidden — just the images.

Parallax Gallery View

A full-screen spatial experience. Photos float at different depths and sizes, scrolling horizontally with parallax movement. Each photo shows its title, date, and photographer on hover. Click any photo to open it in the lightbox.

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Content Types

Single Photo

The simplest content type. One photograph displayed in a centered lightbox with caption, date, and photographer credit.

Ashworth example: “Sunday Morning Light” — Helen Ashworth, 1974

Content: One photo with image, caption, date, and photographer.

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Single Photo with Story

When a photo has a longer narrative (caption exceeds ~100 characters), the lightbox switches to a split layout: photo on the left, story text on the right. Supports rich text formatting — headings, blockquotes, and bullet points.

Ashworth example: “The Backyard Oak” — James Ashworth, 1982

Content: Same as a single photo, but with a multi-line caption using rich-text formatting — headings, blockquotes, and bullet points.

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Photo Set with Video Story

A collection of photographs linked to a Vimeo video with chapter markers. The lightbox shows the split layout: photo left, video player right. When the video plays, chapters automatically crossfade the photo to match.

Ashworth example: “Harbor Memories” — 5 photos, 5:30 Vimeo video, 5 chapters

Key features:

• Chromeless Vimeo embed with custom MediaControls
• Clickable chapter segments sized proportionally to duration
• Chapter progress fill animates smoothly
• Photo crossfades on chapter transitions
• Play/pause, time, volume, mute, fullscreen controls

Content: Photo Set + linked Photos (ordered) + a Video Story. Chapters come from the video itself.

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Photo Set with Audio Story

A collection of photographs with a narrated audio story. The lightbox shows a waveform audio player and auto-generated transcript.

Ashworth example: “The Kitchen Table” — 4 photos, 3:34 audio narration, auto-transcribed text

Key features:

• Real waveform visualization via wavesurfer.js
• Click or drag the waveform to seek
• Play/pause, elapsed/total time, mute toggle
• Narrator name and duration
• Collapsible transcript — “Tap to read full transcript” / “Tap to collapse”
• Auto-paragraphed for readability
• Photos manually browsable via lightbox navigation

Content: Photo Set + linked Photos + an Audio Story with:

• Audio File attachment (MP3 preferred)
• Narrator name and duration
• Transcript (auto-generated or manually provided)

Tip

If a curator provides a transcript manually, it takes priority over the auto-generated one.

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Content Types Not Yet Demonstrated

These types are supported by the platform but don’t have demo content in the Ashworth Collection yet:

Type	Status	Notes
Plain photo set (no media)	Supported	Opens as a slideshow carousel with prev/next arrows and dot indicators
Single photo + audio	Supported	Renders waveform player inline below the photo in the lightbox
Single photo + video	Supported	Renders Vimeo embed in the split layout for a single photo

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Audio Format Requirements

Attribute	Requirement
Preferred format	MP3
Also supported	WAV, M4A, WebM
Recommended bitrate	128 kbps (sufficient for voice narration)

Note

WAV files are impractical — they are very large for the same duration. MP3 at 128kbps produces a small file with no audible quality difference for spoken content.

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Source: All screenshots from The Ashworth Collection — the public demo museum.