6:24 AM
PhotosPro provides better iPhone photo browsing
This universal iOS app provides a simple and effective layout for browsing your photo library, in addition to giving you an easy way to view metadata and share groups of photos.
The Photos app for the iPhone was overhauled for iOS 7 last year, and I'm still getting used to the Years and Collections and Moments organizational structure. I'm not wild about it and, thus, have turned to third-party apps for browsing the many photos on my iPhone. I have used Photowerks, and I am now trying out PhotosPro, a $1.99 universal app.
The app provides a layout with thumbnails that are large enough to see some of the finer details in a shot -- they are larger than the tiny thumbnails in the Moments view of the default Photos app -- but not so large that they make browsing through your photos an exercise in rapid and repetitive finger swipes. Your photos are displayed in chronological order in two columns and grouped by day. A photo's shape and aspect ratio are also shown in this view, which presents an appreciated departure from the square grid of thumbnails you get from the Photos app.
When viewing a photo in full-screen, the location along with the resolution and size and how long ago it was take is displayed at the bottom. Tap on this banner and more metadata and a map are presented, along with a link to view the full EXIF information of the photo.
At the top of the screen are three buttons. The first lets you choose which photo library or album you'd like to view. The middle button displays a calendar overlay, which shows you a tiny thumbnail of the last photo taken on a given day. Tap on a thumbnail on this calendar to jump to that day. The last button provides a map view of your photos. It's similar to the map view you can access from the Years or Collections views in the default Photos app, but you get to see multiple years of photos on the map instead of one year at a time as you do with the Photos app.
If you sign up for a free Pixotale account -- the developer's online sharing platform -- you'll be able to create stories. You can create a story by tapping on thumbnails to select them. A running count of your selected photos is kept via a green badge in the upper-right corner. When your selection is complete, tap the green badge, which gives you options to share the group of photos (email, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Dropbox) or create a new story. A story is a collection of photos and text. You can create a cover image with a title and subtitle and then for each of the included photos you can choose one of two sizes and where to add text between the photos.
You can save a story, which keeps it in the app and accessible from an option hidden behind the hamburger button in the upper-left corner. If you publish a story, it gets uploaded to the Pixotale Web site and you can then share a link to it.
While you can delete any story you create, you cannot delete individual photos within PhotosPro, a restriction Apple's API places on any third-party photo app.
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