Tag: Photos »

If there's one thing people like to do more than taking pictures with their smartphones, it's tinkering with those photos in some way. Numerous apps have sprung up over the last several years that allow you to use filters and special effects to transform your pictures, and it doesn't seem like the appetite for those tricks has been satisfied for all smartphone users just yet.

As evidence, consider the rise of Prisma. Originally released in June, the app has been steadily climbing the App Store charts since then, and is on the verge of breaking into the top 10 as of the time of this post. Prisma's calling card is turning regular photos into pseudo works of art, complete with effects that make it appear your images were painted.

Every time one of Facebook's apps races up the App Store charts, there's usually a reason for it. For Messenger, it was because Facebook disabled the ability to respond to messages within the company's primary app, meaning anyone who wanted to keep in touch with friends and family that way needed the dedicated Messenger app.

The Moments app has experienced a recent surge in popularity in its own right, but due to a slightly different cause. In short, anyone who uses Facebook heavily for photo-sharing and uses the social network on both desktop and mobile is going to want to download Moments before the end of the first week of July.

The latest PhotoTime update is adding even more functionality to the handy photo organizing app. Yep, including Apple Watch support.

BuzzFeed, the masters of hilarious lists, have created their second app: Cute or Not. The app lets you upload photos of your pets and vote for your favorites from thousands of photos. You can swipe right or left to view all the most adorable pets on the internet, and with the power of the mighty voting finger you can decide their fate. Will they become a highly voted, viral sensation or a long forgotten cuddle bug of the past. You decide.

You can also share your favorites with friends and family with the social functions and earn badges to proudly display.

Download Cute or Not for free on the app store and let squeak (or bark, or hiss, etc) the pets of war!

Bitstrips, the app that turns you into a cartoon character, has been updated to include a new feature that lets you add your avatar to photos.

With the Bitphoto update you can take a photo or use one already in your camera roll as a background for your Bitstrips comics. The app lets you choose a variety of poses and give you the option to add a speech bubble so you can say what is on your mind. And when your masterpiece is complete you can show it to your friends and family using the sharing functions.

Bitstrips is free on the App Store, so download it today and start your own comic strip.

The problem with Carousel, the new app from Dropbox released today to organize, present, and share photos isn’t the app itself, it’s what it’s built on.

Carousel is a fantastic app for mobile presentation of photos. Quick and easy to find old photos and show and share them. It's really one of the better cloud photo apps I've tried. The real problem is that it’s build on Dropbox, which is a service created for cloud storage of documents and not for media. And that service is still priced for documents and not media.

Let me back up a second. Dropbox is an amazing service. I’ve used it and paid for it for years. But I’ve never considered it a great place to store photos, video, or other media files. The problem is that is is really expensive right now. In a time where Google is charging $10/month for a terabyte, and Flickr gives every user a free terabyte for images, Dropbox is charging 10x what Google is, and without upgrading to a business plan users can’t even get more then 500GB in an account (for $50/month).

Media piles up quickly. Especially so with photos since every reader of this blog likely has a camera with them at all times of the day, every day. I myself have well over 700GB of images that I’ve stored up from 10+ years of digital photography. I’ve just now started scanning old family photos and there are thousands of those waiting to be completed. All in all I’ll probably need close to a terabyte for just my images to store a “lifetime of memories.” And that doest even count the birthday, vacation, and all the other special occasion videos. This type of media is easier and easier to take and edit, but they will also fill up a Dropbox account very quickly.

So for now, Carousel is a great app, if you have a few hundred photos, but it doesn’t really fit the first selling point that Dropbox is touting it as, it doesn’t allow a lifetime of memories. That is unless you don’t have a lot of memories.

I think Dropbox will be forced into dropping their prices soon. Perhaps they are ready to do it now but didn't want to take the focus away from the new features. Cloud storage is a commodity, and Dropbox is way overpriced right now.

A little over a year ago, everything changed. My daughter, Peregrine (Pip, for short), was born, and along with the myriad recalibrations, adjustments, and joyous changes that birth brought with it, I also finally came to terms with the true value of the iPhone camera: baby pictures! Hundreds and hundreds of them (no exaggeration) were taken by me, by friends, and by family, and then scattered over hard drives, social networks, and of course iPhones. The problem then became figuring out how to organize and store them privately and securely. As a devoted Mac user it’s easy enough to keep photos stored on iPhoto, but that’s a local option only, with limited cloud storage and sharing (those 1,000 photos on iCloud? Please!), and god forbid my hard drive crashes without proper backup.

I thought all of my problems with cloud storage for photos were solved when Everpix came along. Here was a fantastic, well-designed app that also had great web-based software and a Mac-based uploader. Best of all, it could load in all of my photos from various social streams, eliminate or hide duplicates, and handle a potentially unlimited number of photos for a reasonable monthly or yearly price.

There was just one big problem though; Everpix went out of business.

Before I get to the heart of this article, there are a few lessons to learn from my Everpix experience.

One: Always keep all of your photos on a local hard drive.

Two: Backup said hard drive as often as humanly possible (something I still don’t do, so do as I say, not as I do).

Three: Never, ever assume that a site, app, or service will exist forever. It won’t; it just won’t. They will all go away at some point. Some will last five years. Some will last a year or two. Some of the very best won’t even make it that long.

So I found myself back at square one, trying to find another good (read, as close to the effortless Everpix as I could get) cloud-based storage solution for my photos. Read on for my look at nine different cloud storage services that work with iOS.

Lots of third party developers try to one-up stock iOS apps, but so precious few have really given Photos a run for its money. Although Photos+ certainly seems like it's got a shot at it.

Second Gear's new app claims to be "The best way to manage photos on your phone," and that doesn't seem like an empty boast. Photos+ will display your photos in albums with large thumbnails and in full-screen views, show all sorts of extra information such as where a photo was taken and what camera was used, let you easily organize your photos, quickly share via Facebook/Twitter/etc, and it will display animated .gifs. As in it will actually animate them.