Slidebox is iPhone photo management done right

Slidebox - Photo Album Organizer (Free) by Readonly, LLC is a Tinder-like solution for managing your iPhone photos. If you are looking for a fun and simple way of accomplishing this, then Slidebox is worth checking out. It is similar to other apps out there like Flic and Cleen.

Over the years, I’ve taken a lot of photos with my iPhones. For the most part, I just get backup copies on to my computer with Dropbox, but I never put much thought into organizing my Camera Roll images into albums on my device. It didn’t occur to me, and I just always end up being lazy about it. Fortunately, there are third party apps that make the process of organizing and managing more easy and fun, which is what you get with Slidebox.

The design of Slidebox is simple and clean. It’s minimalistic, which is welcome for an app like this as it puts the focus on the photos themselves. All of the icons are easily recognizable, so there is no need to familiarize yourself with anything new. The sans serif typeface used is easy to read and looks great with the rest of the app’s aesthetics. While the app has directions that tell you how the app works at first, they are easy enough to remember once you try out the gestures a few times. In fact, it feels intuitive after a while.

In order to use Slidebox, you will need to grant the app permission to access your photos first, of course. Once that’s done, you’ll see all of your Camera Roll images, though only one is displayed at a time in the center of the screen. Slidebox makes use of Tinder-like swiping gestures to take actions on each photo: swipe left and right to go through each image (and make comparisons on similar images), and swipe up to “trash” it. If you want to save a picture to an album, you’ll need to create the album first, which can be done by tapping on the “Save to Album” button. When you have a few albums already made, just tap the button of the one you want to save the current image to. These albums also show up in the Photos app.

With Slidebox, the app will start with the latest unsorted photo by default, you can tap on the header bar at the top to quickly “jump” to another image in your library. However, while trying this jump feature out, I couldn’t just tap on the top of the screen to go back to the top if I had scrolled down a bit, and there is no way to go through your images faster. This can be annoying if you have a larger collection of images, and I hope that the developers can implement a scrubber bar of some kind and a one-tap gesture for getting back to the top of the screen.

The albums that you make within Slidebox can be viewed directly in the app as well, if you choose not to view them in Photos. You’ll also have the ability to delete entire albums or rename them if needed. If you delete an album, the images in it will be marked as “trash” by the app, but not deleted yet. Any photos that you may have chosen to “trash” won’t be deleted until you tap on the trash can icon on the main view and then choose “Delete Trashed Photos.” Doing this will delete the images from your Camera Roll as well. You can view trashed photos as well to recover them.

I’ve only spent a bit of time with Slidebox so far, but I’m enjoying it for what it’s worth. As someone who has never given any thought into organizing my photos previously, Slidebox is changing how I’m managing my photos, especially for events. The app looks great and is super intuitive — this is how photo management should have been on the iPhone by default. I just hope the developers implement a faster way to go through your photos when doing the quick jump, as well as a faster way to get back to the top of the screen when picking a photo. This is also an app that should be on the iPad as well, so hopefully that comes sooner than later. Other than that, this app is definitely one that anyone should consider for iPhone photo management.

I highly recommend checking out Slidebox if you haven’t already. You can grab Slidebox on the App Store for the iPhone for free.