fbook Photos Review

While I might get shunned for this I'm going to say it anyway, I'm sick of Facebook. Don't get me wrong I used to do the routine several times a day, updating my status, check for birthdays, accept an invite, post a bumper sticker, deny a friend, etcetera, etcetera...and I thrived on it! Quite frankly though, it just became too darn exhausting, especially when Twitter was added into the mix. I've tried to walk away from it all but I know I'll never be completely rid of it, if for no other reason than the pictures. I'm a photo junkie, I love posting them, I love browsing my friend's pics, it's fun to comment on them, but why must I be plagued by all of the other stuff just to see them.

Well if you're an iPad owner and feel the way I do then you have to get fbook Photos. It removes all of the other distractions and leaves you with a very stripped down, Apple-like way of experiencing Facebook photos. The interface itself looks extremely similar to the Photos app that comes installed on every iPad, the main difference being the list of friends on the left side. By selecting any one of them it will display all of their viewable albums in a stack which can then be selected to view individual photos in both thumbnails or full screen. By far the coolest feature of the app though is the built in ability to download the photos. I can't tell you how many time's I've wanted to download a friend's album but have had to do it picture by picture. This app let's you do it both individually or do an entire album with one push of a button. It saves them to your Saved Photos section in your Photo app which can then be downloaded directly into iPhoto (or your application of choice) for your own safe keeping. You can even look at your own profile and download the entire album of Photos of Me which includes every photo posted on FB of you. It's not perfect yet as you can't pick and choose multiple photos at once, it's either all of the pics in an album or do them one at a time, but it's a big step.

Features I'd Like to See Added:
There are several features I could think of that would make the experience even better. For example the lack of ability to tag friends is a little shocking. This is one of the biggest reasons people use the photos feature on FaceBook, needing to jump out of the app and launch Safari to add a tag is extremely cumbersome. Speaking of which there is no direct link to the full FB page either, while built in tagging would be ideal, this would at least be a useable work around. Along the same lines is the inability to leave comments (or view them) for any particular photo. In addition I'd like to be able to click on a person in a photo and be given the option to view their album. Also adding a search option in the Friends list would be nice.

All that being said, while there are some obvious opportunities for the developer to better the app in the end I still enjoy using it, if for no other reason than the download feature. For flickr users the developer has created virtually the same app called flickr Photos and if you find the concept of either of these apps interesting I recommend taking a look at Photo Frame HD.

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