Review: Picture Safe
March 13, 2010
The Overview
After the great Porno Purge of 2010 (February 20th - Bikini and Boobies will never forget!), we are left with few places to get our semi-naked images from rather than Safari and other browsers. We are all left grumbling for our loss and, sorry, but I am not going to turn you on to any apps with secret easter eggs to help you get your groove on.
However, once you DO get the images on you iDevice, what are you going to do with them? Leave them with your vacation photos, hiding behind that pretty little sunflower icon where your kids or just ANYONE can find them? Of course not! You need an app that can store photos that has, at minimum, password protection.
Picture Safe has been in the Top 25 in Utilities for a year and for good reason - this app is incredibly feature rich in organizing, protecting, transferring and hiding your photos...and not just the p0rn...seriously, there are plenty of other legitimate reasons you'd want to hide some of your photos, like....errrr...you are.....ummm......a spy....or something.
The Features
Picture Safe has multiple password protection: your real password , an accidental password, and an interrogation password. Your real password gets you to your actual photos. If someone tries to guess your password, after a preset number of failures, PS acts like they "accidentally" guessed correctly and shows them innocent photos...by default, PUPPIES!...no, wait...just silly background images.
And if you are ever forced to give out your password, say by an upset significant other who threatens to rip your 'nards off unless she sees what is hidden behind that vault icon, this password takes them to same folder of images. My suggestion would be to change those images to something upsetting but not damning....else, why would you be password protecting them?
There are multiple ways to move files into Picture Safe: importing directly from your Photos app, upload through a web interface, upload through FTP, Bluetooth transfer for iDevices that have the hardware, or transfer over USB cable with a special app downloaded directly form the collect3 mobile web site. Unlike similar apps, you can upload 1000s of photos with one push of a button.
The Breakdown
The Good
Did I mention that it hides your porn? And gives you multiple smokescreens to keep prying eyes from seeing what you don't want them to see.
Being able to organize into multiple folders and do all that from your PC or Mac is so much easier than trying to arrange things on your iPhone screen.
Picture Safe has a password hint and password reset function (after answering security questions). I've used other photo privacy apps that completely locked me out if I forgot my password.
Take camera photos and add them straight to Picture Safe from within the app. No need to take pictures then transfer them over.
The Bad
The web interface is very non-intuitive. Without watching the tutorial videos or reading the online documentation, you will spend a lot of time fumbling around trying to figure it out.
Choosing multiple images from the Photo app does not give feedback as to what you have and have not chosen - just a count of the number of images picked. If you feel that you have chosen all the images in a folder, but PS's count is different from the folder count, you'll have to cancel and start all over again.
USB upload is sketchy. The client is still in beta but collect3 customer service responds to your questions fairly (I still cannot get it to work consistently, though).
