Photo Album+ Is An Improved Photo Album On Your iPhone With Better Sharing Capabilities
Photo Album+: Facebook Twitter Dropbox Instagram Uploader ($1.99) by Positano Cat Studio is an improvement over the default photo album for your iPhone.
While Apple's implementation of the photo album is nice, it really lacks when it comes to organization. I had previously reviewed another photo album app, Photology, which I liked, though it needed some improvements. Despite this, it's nice to see more competition coming into the field of photo album replacement apps.
When you open Photo Album+, the app will first prompt for location services. Doing this will allow the app to get the geolocation data for your device’s photos, though it’s not completely necessary. After this prompt, the app will fetch images from your iPhone Photos.app, which includes the Camera Roll and any additional albums you may have on your device.
The Album view is the default view, but you will notice a total of four different tabs along the bottom: Album, Calendar (the developer may want to correct the little typo in the app), Location, and Setting(s).
With the Album view, you will have to “sync” whenever there are new photos after the initial sync (which may take a few moments, depending on how many images you have). Doing any followup syncing should only take a couple of seconds.
To view an album, just tap on it – the way that Photo Album+ organizes photos is pretty awesome. Photos are organized chronologically, but they have time stamps. The views are either Month or Day, with Month showing date next to the timestamp, and Day view just grouping images together by date.
Photos in the albums can be selected by batches, and you are given the option to send or share them. With the Share option, you can upload them to either Dropbox or Facebook. The Send option allows you to email, MMS, or copy the images to the clipboard. An individual photo can be sent to Instagram as well, with a specific cropping view designed for the task.
The Calendar view gives you a calendar, and any days that you have photos for will be marked by a dot. Selecting a day with photos will bring up thumbnails in the empty row beneath the calendar. Toggling through various albums is an easy task by just tapping on the green bar on the calendar.
The Location view gives you red pins on a map, where you have taken photos. You can zoom in and out of the map with multitouch gestures, and even pinpoint your current location on the map with the crosshair button in the top right corner. When a pin is tapped, the app will display how many photos were taken at this location. The blue arrow button will take you to view only those location-specific photos.
Whenever you tap on a thumbnail to view the image, you will get a full screen viewer with some additional information, like the exact date and time. The option to share and send will be in the lower left corner, and the “i” button on the lower right corner will give you more details, such as the EXIF data and other technicalities.
In Settings, you can adjust things like your account logins, background uploading (multitasking), and the time format on thumbnails (12-hour a.m./p.m. or 24-hour time). Additionally, there are upload photo size options for Facebook and Dropbox (Medium or Original Size), so make sure to check that before you upload any images.
I found Photo Album+ to be a pretty good album viewer. Having the ability to view exactly when you took a photo is nice, as well as being able to upload batches of photos to wherever. The interface is well done, aside from the occasional typo.
The only problem I had with the app during my testing is lagging and crashing once the app remains open for a long time. I hope that the developers can improve the performance (for long periods of time) in future updates.
If you’re looking for an all-in-one photo album viewer that makes sharing photos easy and fast, then check out Photo Album+.
