Album App Makes Digital Photo Books Easy To Do
Album App ($3.99) by Dreamix Studio is a very simple digital photography app. Many iOS developers have come out with amazing and creative photo-display apps, like Comic Life, but Album App wins for being the easiest to use. With more than 30 predefined layouts, themes, clip art additions, borders and text features, there is practically no limit to how many ways you can display your vacation photos. There is no need to spend hours and hours trying to figure out complicated or hidden features waiting to frustrate you to no end. This app will take that all that drudgery away from you.
When you first open the app, there is a tutorial that frankly, makes the idea of starting a project intimidating. Please feel free to ignore it. Just start a new album and see what you discover. The first thing you will want to do is pick a theme. Depending on your theme, you will be given a selection of backgrounds, objects and borders to choose from. You can choose a pre-designed layout, or drop your photos wherever you’d like, moving them, layering them and sizing them as you see fit. Once you have the page looking the way you want, add a second page and do it all over again.
If you do not store photos in your iPad’s camera roll, that is not a problem, you can access your Flickr or Facebook account for easy importing into the app. I have not figured out how this actually works since the app does not allow you to choose which photo sets or groups to add. When I selected the Flickr option, it downloaded the most recent 100 photos from my account. Although I had no control over which pictures downloaded, it was very convenient to use what was there.
At the time of writing this, there is no way to export your album. You can’t post to Flickr or Facebook, you can’t send it in an email. The only option is to take screen shots of your artwork and upload it where you want from your camera roll. The developers are aware of their app’s shortcoming and appear to be working diligently to improve it. In fact, there is an RSS feed right in the app itself with updates as to what to expect in the future and how soon. There is also a limited selection of objects. It would be nice to see them spend some time on the clip art feature.
Overall, Album App gets an A for effort and ease of use. However, there are some important features missing, like exporting albums from the app, which cause it to be less than stellar. At $3.99, it may be a high price to pay today, but if the updates continue as promised, it will be worth that and more in the future.
