Relive the best moments of your Camera Roll with MyRoll
MyRoll: Smart Camera Roll Organizer (Free) by Flayvr Media Ltd. is an app that claims to help you organize, find, and share the greatest moments within your Camera Roll. It’s similar to other photo library apps like Tidy and Photoful, but with the focus on the “best” moments.
I take a lot of photos — what better way to remember something than by capturing it in a photo or video, right? I’ve acquired quite a lot of photos in my Camera Roll since I got my 64GB iPhone 5s last year (and that’s not even counting the previous five iPhones I’ve had), so it always seems like a big mess when I go back and look at my captures. While other photo album apps bring in neater ways of organizing your images, they don’t necessarily help you find those lost memories you may have forgotten about over time. Fortunately, MyRoll is here to help you out.
MyRoll is actually a rebranded and rebuilt version of Flayvr, which I actually did not use previously. MyRoll’s interface is pretty simple and clean, which is great, as the focus is placed on your photographs instead. The sky blue accent color of MyRoll is great with the white, and things are laid out in a neat and intuitive manner. The app does have a few introduction screens that you’ll need to swipe through before getting started, although I found the app to be pretty straightforward.
Before you can use MyRoll, though, you’ll need to sign up or log in to your account, or just link your Facebook profile. The account is necessary for sharing the moments that you want to share with others, as these will become uploaded to their secure servers and ready to be viewed by others (who have the link) at any time, anywhere. If you’re concerned about privacy, MyRoll has stated in the description that they do not copy or store your photos and videos. There is also the option of sharing without uploading — these will just be as attachments.
Once you grant the app permission to access your Camera Roll, you will see all of your images loaded up as “moments,” which is basically a group of photos that were taken together on a day. The app uses some kind of algorithm to determine what the “best” shots were that day, depending on the photo content, including faces and smiles. These are served as “highlights” and will show up as the first few images for that date. You can also see how many photos and videos were captured then, thanks to the icons in the bottom right corner of the moment.
You can also switch to the Gallery view, which is similar to how iOS displays your photos — as small thumbnails, though MyRoll has three to four thumbnails per row, depending on image orientation. As you scroll through either view, you’ll see the date appear near the top from the vanishing side scroll bar.
Tapping on the “…” button on moments brings up a contextual menu on the cover, and you have three options: Edit, Favorite, and Share. Edit allows you to change the cover photo, give the moment a name, add or edit the location, and select the images you want to keep in that moment. If you Favorite a moment, it will be saved to your Favorites, and you can view your them through MyRoll’s filters, including hidden images.
Sharing is where the real magic of MyRoll comes in. You can create a Facebook album right from MyRoll, or share through email or SMS. The chosen photos in a moment will be uploaded to MyRoll’s servers, and your recipient can get a link to view the shared album on the web. If you want to share privately without uploading, you need to do this individually for each image, unfortunately.
A tap on a moment brings up the entire event, where you can browse all of the photos you took (and aren’t hidden away). It’s a nice layout, and tapping an image brings it into a larger, focal view. You can even swipe horizontally to go through all of the photos.
By default, MyRoll only chooses your Camera Roll when importing. However, if you access the app’s settings, you can actually choose other photo albums you have in your library, which is nice. But other than this, there isn’t much else to be found in the settings besides a lot of different ways of sharing the app with others and some FAQs.
I like the idea of MyRoll, but the “highlights” of each moment seem pretty random. I also experienced some glitches, where the contextual menu on a moment did not disappear when I tried to get rid of it, and it kept overlapping when I tap on the “…” button again. Other users have left App Store reviews about constant crashing — while I did not experience this on my iPhone 5s, just take it as a word of warning.
MyRoll is definitely a neat idea, but it could be implemented better. Still, it’s free, and it doesn’t hurt to give it a try and see if it works out for you. MyRoll is available on the App Store as a universal download for free.