Great new iPad app to share your photos and videos in an attractive, easy to navigate way. John Gruber explains it:

Storehouse is two things: (1) a creative tool for collecting photos and videos into elegant stories, where a “story” is a single scrolling page; and (2) a hosting service for all published stories. So you use Storehouse both to create your own stories, and also to view/read the stories published by everyone else. Drafts are stored locally on your iPad; once published, all stories are public. You can follow individual users, a la social apps like Twitter and Instagram.

I just downloaded it and it is indeed gorgeous. A perfect way to share photos and videos of your trips with family and friends. Absolutely recommended.

UPDATE: The only thing I’m not liking so far is the need for your photos and videos to be on your iPad in order to use them. This is obvious since this is an iPad-only app, but I suspect most people don’t use their iPads as their main cameras (although the trend seems to be emerging).

Personally, I take most of my pics and videos with my iPhone, due to its superior camera and the convenience factor: it is always in my pocket and ready to use. I also don’t use Shared Photostreams on my iPad because it seems redundant; I prefer to keep my pics on my iPhone (and possibly my Mac), and use the limited storage capacity of my iPad for other media content, like movies and TV shows.

That means in order to use Storehouse I need to previously upload my photos to a 3rd-party service (like Dropbox or Flickr), or use Shared Photostreams on my iPad. Either way, it feels like a waste of time and/or space on my device. I suppose the only way to overcome this would be to release an iPhone version of the app and/or an iPhone-friendly Web client. However, neither of those is easy to implement because the larger display of the iPad is essential in making the editing/uploading process attractive and usable. It is a tough design challenge, for sure.

Anyway, this is admittedly a minor issue that applies mostly to my personal preference and usage pattern; if you don’t mind using Shared Photostreams or you already keep your photos and videos on your iPad, Storehouse is definitely a winner.